33,450 research outputs found
Consistent Probabilistic Social Choice
Two fundamental axioms in social choice theory are consistency with respect
to a variable electorate and consistency with respect to components of similar
alternatives. In the context of traditional non-probabilistic social choice,
these axioms are incompatible with each other. We show that in the context of
probabilistic social choice, these axioms uniquely characterize a function
proposed by Fishburn (Rev. Econ. Stud., 51(4), 683--692, 1984). Fishburn's
function returns so-called maximal lotteries, i.e., lotteries that correspond
to optimal mixed strategies of the underlying plurality game. Maximal lotteries
are guaranteed to exist due to von Neumann's Minimax Theorem, are almost always
unique, and can be efficiently computed using linear programming
Adjustment and social choice
We discuss the influence of information contagion on the dynamics of choices
in social networks of heterogeneous buyers. Starting from an inhomogeneous
cellular automata model of buyers dynamics, we show that when agents try to
adjust their reservation price, the tatonement process does not converge to
equilibrium at some intermediate market share and that large amplitude
fluctuations are actually observed. When the tatonnement dynamics is slow with
respect to the contagion dynamics, large periodic oscillations reminiscent of
business cycles appear.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure
Sequential Deliberation for Social Choice
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study
of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in
instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for
ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical.
How then can we design a mechanism - preferably decentralized, simple,
scalable, and not requiring any special knowledge of the decision space - to
reach consensus? We propose sequential deliberation as a natural solution to
this problem. In this iterative method, successive pairs of agents bargain over
the decision space using the previous decision as a disagreement alternative.
We describe the general method and analyze the quality of its outcome when the
space of preferences define a median graph. We show that sequential
deliberation finds a 1.208- approximation to the optimal social cost on such
graphs, coming very close to this value with only a small constant number of
agents sampled from the population. We also show lower bounds on simpler
classes of mechanisms to justify our design choices. We further show that
sequential deliberation is ex-post Pareto efficient and has truthful reporting
as an equilibrium of the induced extensive form game. We finally show that for
general metric spaces, the second moment of of the distribution of social cost
of the outcomes produced by sequential deliberation is also bounded
Ontology Merging as Social Choice
The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering
and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner.We propose
to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e. as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals
into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in
this direction, we formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of
these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work
in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between
facts not included in an agent’s ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent’s ontology
Social Choice and Popular Control
In democracies citizens are supposed to have some control over the general direction of policy. According to a pretheoretical interpretation of this idea, the people have control if elections and other democratic institutions compel officials to do what the people want, or what the majority want. This interpretation of popular control fits uncomfortably with insights from social choice theory; some commentators—Riker, most famously—have argued that these insights should make us abandon the idea of popular rule as traditionally understood. This article presents a formal theory of popular control that responds to the challenge from social choice theory. It makes precise a sense in which majorities may be said to have control even if the majority preference relation has an empty core. And it presents a simple game-theoretic model to illustrate how majorities can exercise control in this specified sense, even when incumbents are engaged in purely re-distributive policymaking and the majority rule core is empty
The voter who wasn’t there : Referenda, representation and abstention
We analyze single binary-choice voting rules and identify the presence of the No-Show paradox in this simple setting, as a consequence of specific turnout or quorum conditions that are included in actual rules. Since these conditions are meant to ensure a representative outcome, we formalize this concern and reach our main result: no voting rule can ensure representation if abstention is possible, unless restrictive assumptions are made on the preference domain of abstainers. We then focus on the main referendum systems and show that appropriate restrictions do make them compatible with representation. The main purpose of our paper is, however, to provide a tool for referendum design: rather than imposing arbitrary restrictions on the preference domain of non-voters, we recommend instead that a conscious choice be made on how abstention is to be interpreted and that this choice be used to derive the corresponding referendum rule..info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Resolute refinements of social choice correspondences
Many classical social choice correspondences are resolute only in the case of
two alternatives and an odd number of individuals. Thus, in most cases, they
admit several resolute refinements, each of them naturally interpreted as a
tie-breaking rule, satisfying different properties. In this paper we look for
classes of social choice correspondences which admit resolute refinements
fulfilling suitable versions of anonymity and neutrality. In particular,
supposing that individuals and alternatives have been exogenously partitioned
into subcommittees and subclasses, we find out arithmetical conditions on the
sizes of subcommittees and subclasses that are necessary and sufficient for
making any social choice correspondence which is efficient, anonymous with
respect to subcommittees, neutral with respect to subclasses and possibly
immune to the reversal bias admit a resolute refinement sharing the same
properties.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1503.0402
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