•A group decision making method with two different modes of assessments is developed.•Belief distributions and distributed preference relations are unified.•Internal consistency and Pareto principle ...for unifying the two modes are proven.•The proposed method is used to solve the problem of selecting a key field.•Internal consistency and Pareto principle are verified using the data in the problem.
To solve multiple criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problems with belief distributions (BDs) and distributed preference relations (DPRs), this paper proposes a new method. For unifying BDs and DPRs, the transformation from BDs into DPRs is developed. Two important properties of the transformation, which are the internal consistency and the Pareto principle of social choice theory, are theoretically proven on the condition that the evidential reasoning algorithm is used to combine DPRs. With a view to relieving the burden on decision makers to provide complete DPR matrices, the process of generating solutions to the MCGDM problems from the DPRs between neighboring alternatives and belief matrices composed of BDs is presented through the consistency between the score intervals of the DPRs. The proposed method is used to select a key filed for an enterprise located in Hefei, Anhui Province, China. The selection is validated by analyzing actual situations to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed method. The internal consistency and the Pareto principle of social choice theory are verified through the relevant results of conducting the selection and simulation experiments based on selected data and random parameters in the field selection problem.
Classical social choice theory relies heavily on the assumption that all individuals have fixed preference orderings. This highly original book presents a new theory of social preferences that ...explicitly accounts for important social phenomena such as coordination, compromise, negotiation and altruism. Drawing on cybernetics and network theory, it extends classical social choice theory by constructing a framework that allows for dynamic preferences that are modulated by the situation-dependent social influence that they exert on each other. In this way the book shows how members of a social network may modulate their preferences to account for social context. This important expansion of social choice theory will be of interest to readers in a wide variety of disciplines, including economists and political scientists concerned with choice theory as well as computer scientists and engineers working on network theory.
Minimal voting paradoxes Brandt, Felix; Matthäus, Marie; Saile, Christian
Journal of theoretical politics,
10/2022, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Voting paradoxes date back to the origin of social choice theory in the 18th century, when the Chevalier de Borda pointed out that plurality—then and now the most common voting rule—may elect a ...candidate who loses pairwise majority comparisons against every other candidate. Since then, a large number of similar, seemingly paradoxical, phenomena have been observed in the literature. As it turns out, many paradoxes only materialize under some rather contrived circumstances and require a certain number of voters and candidates. In this paper, we leverage computational optimization techniques to identify the minimal numbers of voters and candidates that are required for the most common voting paradoxes to materialize. The resulting compilation of voting paradoxes may serve as a useful reference to social choice theorists as well as an argument for the deployment of certain rules when the numbers of voters or candidates are severely restricted.
Deliberation and epistemic democracy Ding, Huihui; Pivato, Marcus
Journal of economic behavior & organization,
05/2021, Letnik:
185
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
•We study how deliberation affects epistemic social choice –both Condorcet Jury and probability pooling.•Each deliberator can discloses some private information to persuade the other agents of her ...current views.•But her views may also evolve over time, as she learns from other agents (it is a dynamic model).•Agents generally do not disclose all their private information, because of communication costs.•Under certain conditions, the decision reached in equilibrium is the same as with full information pooling.
We study the effects of deliberation on epistemic social choice, in two settings. In the first setting, the group faces a binary epistemic decision analogous to the Condorcet Jury Theorem. In the second setting, group members have probabilistic beliefs arising from their private information, and the group wants to aggregate these beliefs in a way that makes optimal use of this information. During deliberation, each agent discloses private information to persuade the other agents of her current views. But her views may also evolve over time, as she learns from other agents. This process will improve the performance of the group, but only under certain conditions; these involve the nature of the social decision rule, the group size, and also the presence of “neutral agents” whom the other agents try to persuade.
We investigate the implementation of social choice functions (SCFs) from an epistemological perspective. We consider the possibility that in higher-order beliefs there exists an honest agent who is ...motivated by intrinsic preference for honesty as well as material interest. We assume weak honesty, in that, although any honest agent has a cost of lying that is positive but close to zero, she (or he) is mostly motivated by material interests and even tells white lies. This study assumes that all agents are fully informed of the physical state, but “all agents are selfish” never happens to be common knowledge in epistemology. We show the following positive results for the implementability: with three or more agents, any SCF is uniquely implementable in the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE). An SCF, whether material or nonmaterial (ethical), can be implemented even if all agents are selfish and “all agents are selfish” is mutual knowledge.
Spelling Bees Boudreau, James W.; Kettering, Jeremy; Sanders, Shane D.
The American behavioral scientist (Beverly Hills),
03/2024
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this note, we consider a form of competition in which two contestants face separate sequences of independent trials. The contestant with the longer sequence of successful trials wins. However, ...since the trials are independent, there may be a form of paradox whereby the loser is able to pass all of the trials in the winner’s sequence, whereas the winner could not have overcome two or more trials in the loser’s sequence. We refer to this as the spelling bee paradox and explore its likelihood in simple settings. JEL Classification Codes: C46, D74, Z29.
Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (Cowles Monograph No. 12, 1951), a work that established the field of social choice and set the limits for what public economic theory could hope ...to achieve, was formulated at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago from 1947 to 1949 (and during the summer of 1948 at the RAND Corporation) in a context in which concern with using economic theory to guide the economy was intense. During the period just before he shared in developing the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie proof of existence of general equilibrium, Arrow moved through a series of papers to prove the non-existence of a social welfare function. The context of Arrow's non-existence proof for aggregation of individual preferences into social welfare function and to Arrow's shift from trying to prove a possibility theorem for social welfare to proving an impossibility theorem has been confused by a reprinted and influential reminiscence in which Arrow mis-remembered when he had spent a summer at RAND and when he had presented his impossibility theorem to the Econometric Society.
•A review of the consensus models in group decision making is presented.•Five criteria for evaluating the efficiency of consensus models are proposed.•Simulation methods are devised to analyze the ...efficiency of consensus models.•Novel multi-stage optimization-based consensus models are developed.
Consensus reaching processes (CRPs) aim to help decision-makers achieve agreement regarding the solution to a common decision problem, and consequently play an increasingly important role in the resolution of group decision making (GDM) problems. To date, a large number of CRPs have been reported. However, there is a lack of a general framework and criteria to evaluate the efficiency of the different CRPs. This paper aims to fill this gap in the research literature on CRPs. To achieve this goal, firstly, a comprehensive review regarding the different approaches to CRP is reported, and a series of CRPs as the comparison objects are presented. Secondly, the following comparison criteria for measuring the efficiency of CPRs are proposed: the number of adjusted decision-makers, the number of adjusted alternatives, the number of adjusted preference values, the distance between the original and the adjusted preference information (adjustment cost), and the number of negotiation rounds required to reach consensus. Following this, a detailed simulation experiment is designed to analyze the efficiency of different CRPs under the mentioned different comparison criteria. Furthermore, new multi-stage optimization-based CRPs are also developed, which the simulation experiment shows to have better comprehensive consensus efficiency in different GDM settings.
As was pointed out to us by Huaxia Zeng, Theorem 1 in Bonifacio and Massó (2020), is not correct. In this note we recall former Theorem 1, exhibit a counterexample of its statement, identify the ...mistake in its faulty proof, and state and prove the new version of Theorem 1. At the end we give an alternative proof of Lemma 9, whose former proof used incorrectly Lemma 5.
Notation and definitions are as in the section of Preliminaries in Bonifacio and Massó (2020).
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