I thought interpersonal comparisons of utility were generally considered to be impossible.
This is true about aggregating ordinal utilities, but doesn’t hold for cardinal utilities (see Arrow’s theorem). If you are talking about comparing utilities (i.e. choosing a normalization method), I’m not aware of a general consensus that this is impossible.
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.
This is true about aggregating ordinal utilities, but doesn’t hold for cardinal utilities (see Arrow’s theorem). If you are talking about comparing utilities (i.e. choosing a normalization method), I’m not aware of a general consensus that this is impossible.
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.