Multilinear representations for ordinal utility functions (Q1086521)

The class of ordinal utility functions (UF) over n attributes for which each pair of attributes is additive, but not necessarily separable, for any fixed levels of the remaining attributes, is considered. It is demonstrated that a class of multilinear decompositions of the UF is equivalent to an assumption of pairwise weak conditional additivity among the attributes. This class of decompositions is more general than those that are ordinally additive; the assessment task is of the same order of difficulty.