Bergson and Samuelson held that individual utility functions are to be constructed from preference orderings via fairness principles, not assumed to carry cardinal or interpersonally comparable information.
Fairness principles(as the method for constructing utility functions instead of making assumptions)
Rules or standards about what counts as just or equitable treatment when making decisions that affect people.
Interpersonally comparable(as information that utility functions should not assume to carry)
The ability to compare one person's satisfaction or happiness directly with another person's; for example, knowing whether your happiness from eating ice cream is greater than your friend's happiness from the same ice cream.
Preference orderings(as the starting point for constructing utility functions)
A ranking of options from most to least preferred; for example, if you like pizza more than salad and salad more than broccoli, that's your preference ordering.
Samuelson(as a reference to a specific economist's ideas)
Paul Samuelson was a famous 20th-century economist who developed important theories about how people make choices and what we can learn from their preferences.
Utility functions(as the subject being constructed from preferences)
A mathematical way of representing how much satisfaction or happiness a person gets from different choices or goods; basically a formula that predicts what makes someone happy.
Bergson (1938) and Samuelson (1947, 1981) occupy a special position, which may be described as a third way between old and new welfare economics. From the former, they retain the goal of making complete and consistent social welfare judgments with the help of well-defined social welfare functions. The formula W(U1(x),…,Un(x)) is often named a “Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function” (x is the social state; Ui(x), for i=1,…,n, is individual i’s utility in this state). With the latter, however,