Economists generally regard interpersonal utility comparisons as impossible; hence the focus on Pareto, and then Kalder-Hicks, optimality. See for example this, though any decent economics textbook will cover it.
The problem, of course, is that utility functions are only defined up to an affine transformation.
Economists generally regard interpersonal utility comparisons as impossible; hence the focus on Pareto, and then Kalder-Hicks, optimality. See for example this, though any decent economics textbook will cover it.
The problem, of course, is that utility functions are only defined up to an affine transformation.
Which is why I normalise them first before adding them up.