- Title
- The Non-Existence of Representative Agents
- Author(s)
- Matthew O. Jackson Matthew Jackson (Stanford University)
- Leeat Yariv Leeat Yariv (Princeton University)
- Abstract
- We characterize environments having a representative agent: an agent whose preferences over aggregate alternatives correspond to a weighted average of the population’s utilities for the disaggregated alternatives. The existence of a representative agent imposes strong restrictions on individual utility functions — requiring them to be linear in the allocation and additively separable in any parameter that characterizes agents’ preferences (e.g.; a risk aversion parameter; a discount factor; etc.).
- Creation Date
- 2020-08
- Section URL ID
- Paper Number
- 2020-74
- URL
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2684776
- File Function
- Jel
- D72, D71, D03, D11, E24
- Keyword(s)
- Representative Agents, Preference Aggregation, Revealed Preference, Collective Decisions
- Suppress
- false
- Series
- 13