L'estimation des préférences individuelles pour la décision publique. Problèmes, paradoxes, enjeux

A public decision maker needs to decide to allocate some subsidy towards the conditions for public transportation or for private transportation. If she wants to improve the collective welfare of the community based on the individual preferences between public and private transportation, she needs to learn about the latter. A possible way to infer individual preferences lies in the revealed preference theory. With Saaris's technique of probability calculus, it becomes possible to study how much information is reliable for plausible assumptions about the conditions of data observations. We conclude that public decision makers may hardly get the relevant welfarist information to circumvent the problem raised by the lack of independence condition. This counter-example provides an operational argument against the use of strict technical welfarism in public economics.