Behavioral Social Choice: Probabilistic Models, Statistical Inference, and Applications

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings

Reasons, Coherence, and Group Rationality

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView

Revisiting consistency with random utility maximisation: theory and implications for practical work

While the paradigm of utility maximisation has formed the basis of the majority of applications in discrete choice modelling for over 40 years, its core assumptions have been questioned by work in both behavioural economics and mathematical psychology as well as more recently by developments in the RUM-oriented choice modelling community. This paper reviews the basic properties with a view to explaining the historical pre-eminence of utility maximisation and addresses the question of what departures from the paradigm may be necessary or wise in order to accommodate richer behavioural patterns. We find that many, though not all, of the behavioural traits discussed in the literature can be approximated sufficiently closely by a random utility framework, allowing analysts to retain the many advantages that such an approach possesses

Behavioural social choice: a status report

Behavioural social choice has been proposed as a social choice parallel to seminal developments in other decision sciences, such as behavioural decision theory, behavioural economics, behavioural finance and behavioural game theory. Behavioural paradigms compare how rational actors should make certain types of decisions with how real decision makers behave empirically. We highlight that important theoretical predictions in social choice theory change dramatically under even minute violations of standard assumptions. Empirical data violate those critical assumptions. We argue that the nature of preference distributions in electorates is ultimately an empirical question, which social choice theory has often neglected. We also emphasize important insights for research on decision making by individuals. When researchers aggregate individual choice behaviour in laboratory experiments to report summary statistics, they are implicitly applying social choice rules. Thus, they should be aware of the potential for aggregation paradoxes. We hypothesize that such problems may substantially mar the conclusions of a number of (sometimes seminal) papers in behavioural decision research

Stochastic applications of media theory: random walks on weak orders or partial orders

AbstractThis paper presents the axioms of a real time random walk on the set of states of a medium and some of their consequences, such as the asymptotic probabilities of the states. The states of the random walk coincide with those of the medium, and the transitions of the random walk are governed by a probability distribution on the set of token-events, together with a Poisson process regulating the arrivals of such events. We examine two special cases. The first is the medium on strict weak orders on a set of three elements, the second the medium of strict partial orders on the same set. Thus, in each of these cases, a state of the medium is a binary relation. We also consider tune in-and-out extensions of these two special cases. We review applications of these models to opinion poll data pertaining to the 1992 United States presidential election. Each strict weak order or strict partial order is interpreted as being the implicit or explicit opinion of some individual regarding the three major candidates in that election, namely, Bush, Clinton and Perot. In particular, the strict partial order applications illustrate our notion of a response function that provides the link between theory and data in situations where, in contrast to previous papers, the permissible responses do not span the entire set of permissible states of the medium