I think that pie-cutting is usually negative-sum, because of diminishing returns and transaction costs. So, if you could make utilitarianism into a voting system it would at least ameliorate the problem (ofc we can’t easily do that because of dishonesty). However, ideally what we probably want is not utilitarianism but something like a bargaining solution. Moreover, in practice we don’t know the utility functions, so we should assume some prior distribution over possible utility functions and choose the voting system that minimizes some kind of expected regret.
I think that pie-cutting is usually negative-sum, because of diminishing returns and transaction costs. So, if you could make utilitarianism into a voting system it would at least ameliorate the problem (ofc we can’t easily do that because of dishonesty). However, ideally what we probably want is not utilitarianism but something like a bargaining solution. Moreover, in practice we don’t know the utility functions, so we should assume some prior distribution over possible utility functions and choose the voting system that minimizes some kind of expected regret.
Right, very much agreed. The thing I was trying to convey was the difference between utilitarianism and a bargaining solution.