ABSTRACT
I have worked during the past two decades at Dalarna University in Sweden. In both formal and informal meetings outside the university, I frequently hear the question: What is the stand of Dalarna University on issue x? This is a question which I find bewildering. Working within a university, the idea of a unified stand on any one issue across its faculty members is beyond understanding, since 162the faculty consists of too many diverse, strong-minded individuals and decision makers with idiosyncratic objective functions. Formed in such an environment, I will limit what follows to individual decision-making after the following ingenuous remark. Humans are most certainly faced with collective decision-making. Unfortunately, Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem defines collective decisions achievable only as a dictatorial imposed decision (Arrow, 1963), which undeniably implies individual decision-making. Sen (1999) in his Nobel Laureate address puts forward an optimistic view on overcoming the impossibility by informational broadening that, inter alia, could be achieved by the members in the collective internalization of the other members’ preferences (in their idiosyncratic decision-making). In what follows, I disregard the issue of collective decision-making by assuming that individual decision-making can be made collectively satisfactory by the internalization of other members’ preferences, values, and beliefs, retrieved by the individual in the collective decision-making process (for instance, via decision engineering; March, 1978).
