Comparison meaningful operators and ordinal invariant preferences

Abstract

The existence of a continuous and order-preserving real-valued function, for the class of continuous and ordinal invariant total preorders, defined on the Banach space of all bounded real-valued functions, which are in turn defined on a given set Ω, is characterized. Whenever the total preorder is nontrivial, the type of representation obtained leads to a functional equation that is closely related to the concept of comparison meaningfulness, and is studied in detail in this setting. In particular, when restricted to the space of bounded and measurable real-valued functions, with respect to some algebra of subsets of Ω, we prove that, if the total preorder is also weakly Paretian, then it can be represented as a Choquet integral with respect to a {0,1}-valued capacity. Some interdisciplinary applications to measurement theory and social choice are also considered.