Linear Extensions of Additive Partial Orders

Addive partial orders arise naturally in theories of comparativeprobability and subset preferences. An additive partial order is a partialorder on the family of subsets of ann-element set that satisfies . This is reformulated as a subset P of {1,0,–1}ⁿ that excludes 0 and containsx+y whenever x,y P and x+y {1,0,–1}ⁿ. Additional conditions of positivity andcompleteness give rise to positive additive partial orders and additivelinear orders respectively. The paper investigates conditions under which anadditive partial order is included in, or extendable to, an additive linearorder. The additive dimension of an extendable additive partial order isdefined and computed for several classes of additive orders.