On Initial Conferment of Individual Rights

An extended social choice framework is proposed for the analysis of initial conferment of individual rights. This framework captures the intuitive conception of decision-making procedure as a carrier of intrinsic value along with the instrumental usefulness thereof in realizing valuable culmination outcomes. The model of social decision-making consists of two stages. In the first stage, the society decides on the game-form rights to be promulgated. In the second stage, the promulgated game form rights, coupled with the revealed profile of individual preference orderings over the set of culmination outcomes, determine a fully-fledged game, the play of which determines a culmination outcome at the Nash equilibrium. A set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a social choice procedure, which can choose a game form in the first stage that is not only liberal, but also uniformly applicable to every revealed profile of individual preference orderings over the set of culmination outcomes, is identified.Extended alternative, Extended constitution function, Uniformly rational choice, Liberal game form, Non-consequentialist evaluation of rightssystem

The limitations of the Arrovian consistency of domains with a fixed preference

In this paper I investigate the properties of social welfare functions defined on domains where the preferences of one agent remain fixed. Such a domain is a degenerate case of those investigated, and proved Arrow consistent, by Sakai and Shimoji (Soc Choice Welf 26(3):435–445,2006). Thus, they admit functions from them to a social preference that satisfy Arrow’s conditions of Weak Pareto, Independence of IrrelevantAlternatives, and Non-dictatorship. However, I prove that according to any function that satisfies these conditions on such a domain, for any triple of alternatives, if the agent with the fixed preferences does not determine the social preference on any pair of them, then some other agent determines the social preference on the entire triple

Aggregation Theory and the Relevance of Some Issues to Others

International audienceI propose a relevance-based independence axiom on how to aggregate individual yes/no judgments on given propositions into collective judgments: the collective judgment on a proposition depends only on people's judgments on propositions which are relevant to that proposition. This axiom contrasts with the classical independence axiom: the collective judgment on a proposition depends only on people's judgments on the same proposition. I generalize the premise-based rule and the sequential-priority rule to an arbitrary priority order of the propositions, instead of a dichotomous premise/conclusion order resp. a linear priority order. I prove four impossibility theorems on relevance-based aggregation. One theorem simultaneously generalizes Arrow's Theorem (in its general and indifference-free versions) and the well-known Arrow-like theorem in judgment aggregation

A new measure of consensus with reciprocal preference relations: The correlation consensus degree

Producción CientíficaThe achievement of a ‘consensual’ solution in a group decision making problem depends on experts’ ideas, principles, knowledge, experience, etc. The measurement of consensus has been widely studied from the point of view of different research areas, and consequently different consensus measures have been formulated, although a common characteristic of most of them is that they are driven by the implementation of either distance or similarity functions. In the present work though, and within the framework of experts’ opinions modelled via reciprocal preference relations, a different approach to the measurement of consensus based on the Pearson correlation coefficient is studied. The new correlation consensus degree measures the concordance between the intensities of preference for pairs of alternatives as expressed by the experts. Although a detailed study of the formal properties of the new correlation consensus degree shows that it verifies important properties that are common either to distance or to similarity functions between intensities of preferences, it is also proved that it is different to traditional consensus measures. In order to emphasise novelty, two applications of the proposed methodology are also included. The first one is used to illustrate the computation process and discussion of the results, while the second one covers a real life application that makes use of data from Clinical Decision-Making.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Project ECO2012-32178

A new measure of consensus with reciprocal preference relations: The correlation consensus degree

Producción CientíficaThe achievement of a ‘consensual’ solution in a group decision making problem depends on experts’ ideas, principles, knowledge, experience, etc. The measurement of consensus has been widely studied from the point of view of different research areas, and consequently different consensus measures have been formulated, although a common characteristic of most of them is that they are driven by the implementation of either distance or similarity functions. In the present work though, and within the framework of experts’ opinions modelled via reciprocal preference relations, a different approach to the measurement of consensus based on the Pearson correlation coefficient is studied. The new correlation consensus degree measures the concordance between the intensities of preference for pairs of alternatives as expressed by the experts. Although a detailed study of the formal properties of the new correlation consensus degree shows that it verifies important properties that are common either to distance or to similarity functions between intensities of preferences, it is also proved that it is different to traditional consensus measures. In order to emphasise novelty, two applications of the proposed methodology are also included. The first one is used to illustrate the computation process and discussion of the results, while the second one covers a real life application that makes use of data from Clinical Decision-Making.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Project ECO2012-32178