Social Decision, Strategic Behavior, and Best Outcomes

Abstract

What ought to happen depends at least in part on what the people involved prefer. I shall take that as a truism, though it may need qualifications: perhaps what ought to happen depends not on what people actually prefer, but on what they would prefer if they were fully informed and clearheaded, and perhaps it depends not on what people prefer on the whole, but on what each person prefers as regards himself. Accepting these qualifications, though, would only make the problem I raise in this paper more difficult. I shall assume here that what ought to happen depends at least partly on the preferences the people involved actually have. If the reader thinks that only informed preferences matter, he can think of the paper as addressing the special case where actual preferences are fully informed, and if he thinks that only self-regarding preferences matter, he can think of the paper as tackling the special case where everyone’s preferences are self-regarding.