Abstract Book of the 16th International Conference on Management, Economics and Humanities
Year: 2025
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Steady-state of preferences in a society and a suggested social preference
Shiri Alon and Ehud Lehrer
ABSTRACT:
This paper employs a model, due to Friedkin and Johnsen [15], describing preference formation where individuals in a society repeatedly adjust their preferences based on the preferences of others, while always maintaining a fixed portion of their original core preferences. This process generates a steady state of preferences, which may vary across individuals but are more similar than their original preferences. We identify a unique social preference function that emerges from the primitives and dynamics of the process, if individuals may internalize their steady-state preferences and repeat the adjustment process, reaching a new steady state, and so on. We further consider the preferences that obtain when individuals gradually eliminate the reliance on their core preferences.
Keywords: Other-regarding preferences, subjective utilitarianism, social context, axiomatization, social choice