Frequently, utilitarian ethics are presented from the point of view of individual decision-making, that is, the maximization of the "pleasure less suffering" function which underlyies rational choice in the context of personal self-interest; and the argument goes on by defining collective utility as a direct (botttom-up) aggregation of individual utilities. This might be a correct description of the behavior of people in competitive games (such as the idealized free market), and so this approach usually makes up a clear, recognizable stance about the philosophical justification of collective action (in a essence, the group behavior is ethically justified iff the sum of individual utilities is maximized, and the only way to change that is through individual, atomistic decisions, in the purely competitive game that makes up the decision-making background).
Nevertheless, where the context provides an effective way to engage in cooperative decision-making as an alternative strategy to detached individual choice, I think it's arguably possible to evaluate the collective utility of the group through (at least) two functions defined by their corresponding strategy schema; and also, that this two won't generally coincide (as exemplified by the Prisoner's Dilemma). This might mean that the ethically justified behavior of a group depends on which kind of strategies the underlying game allows, because the form of the aggregate utility function to be maximized by it's actions depends on the nature of the available decision-making alternatives. Of course that in some situations (for example, the competitive agents in a free market) the only alternative is individual decision-making, but it is reasonable to assert that in practice, there's always a social meta-level in which cooperative decision-making becomes an alternative, or vice versa (i.e. political movements in one or other direction, for example, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet Union collapse in 1991 respectively); so in principle, comparing the two ways of evaluating public utility is always a possibility, and so the ethical justification of a collective action should always be aware of this (and also, this might be a way of challenging naive utilitarian justifications from an utilitarian point of view).
My question is, is there any utilitarian thinker which has taken into account this two (or any combination of both) non-equivalent ways of maximizing collective utility in the sense defined above (and not just in the way of Adam Smith's invisible hand always making everyone's life happier through competition, and so allowing just one degree of freedom, the bottom-up approach, in any group decision-making process)?
