A Budget-Balanced, Incentive-Compatible Scheme for Social Choice

In this paper, we provide axiomatic foundations for social choice rules on a domain of convex and comprehensive social choice problems when agents have cardinal utility functions. We translate the axioms of three well known approaches in bargaining theory (Nash 1950; Kalai and Smorodinsky 1975; Kalai 1977) to the domain of social choice problems and provide an impossibility result for each. We then introduce the concept of a reference function which, for each social choice set, selects a point from which relative gains are measured. By restricting the invariance and comparison axioms so that they only apply to sets with the same reference point, we obtain characterizations of social choice rules that are natural analogues of the bargaining theory solutions.

Social choice problems with fixed sets of alternatives

Collective decision making is the process of mapping the individual views of several individual agents into a joint decision. The need for collective decision making mechanisms is abundant, not just in the realm of politics, but also for a wide range of scientific and technological applications. These include, for instance, logistics, grid computing, and recommender systems. The alternatives to be decided upon often have a combinatorial structure: an alternative is characterised by a tuple of variables, each ranging over a finite domain. Classical approaches to collective decision making, developed in social choice theory, do not take the computational limitations induced by the combinatorial nature of the problem into account. For instance, if we are asked to elect a committee consisting of k representatives, choosing from a pool of n candidates, then we are in fact faced with a social choice problem with $(^n_k)$ alternatives. Asking each voter for their full preferences over these $(^n_k)$ alternatives may not be feasible in practice. Similarly, if we have to choose between accepting or rejecting each of n different propositions, then we are dealing with a social choice problem with 2 n possible outcomes. In this talk I will report on a number of recent developments in the area of collective decision making in combinatorial domains. This includes the study of languages for the compact representation of preferences [2,4], the design of voting rules for multi-issue elections [1], and the analysis of the computational complexity of decision problems arising in judgment aggregation [3].

We consider a social choice problem where individual rationality is required. The status quo belongs to the outcome space, and the selected alternative must be weakly better than the status quo for everybody. If the mechanism designer has no knowledge of the alternatives, we obtain a negative result: any individually rational (IR) and strategy-proof (SP) mechanism can choose at most one alternative (besides the status quo), regardless of the preferences. To overcome this negative result, we consider a domain where the alternatives have a known structure, i.e., an agent is indifferent between the status quo and a subset of the outcomes. This set is exogenously given and public information. This assumption is natural if the social choice involves the participation of agents. For example, consider a group of people organizing a trip where participation is voluntary. We can assume each agent is indifferent between the trip plans in which she does not participate and the status quo (i.e., no trip). In this setting, we obtain more positive results: we develop a class of mechanisms called Approve and Choose mechanisms, which are IR and SP, and can choose multiple alternatives as well as the status quo.

The extraordinary technological progress we have witnessed in recent years has made it possible to generate and exchange multimedia content at an unprecedented rate. As a consequence, massive collections of multimedia objects are now widely available to a large population of users. As the task of browsing such large collections could be daunting, Recommender Systems are being developed to assist users in finding items that match their needs and preferences. In this article, we present a novel approach to recommendation in multimedia browsing systems, based on modeling recommendation as a social choice problem. In social choice theory, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives, and individual rankings are aggregated into a global ranking. In our formulation, the set of voters and the set of alternatives both coincide with the set of objects in the data collection. We first define what constitutes a choice in the browsing domain and then define a mechanism to aggregate individual choices into a global ranking. The result is a framework for computing customized recommendations by originally combining intrinsic features of multimedia objects, past behavior of individual users, and overall behavior of the entire community of users. Recommendations are ranked using an importance ranking algorithm that resembles the well-known PageRank strategy. Experiments conducted on a prototype of the proposed system confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

We explore the implications of “nosy” preferences—when individuals have rankings over the specific actions of others—using recent theoretical results in the behavioral economics literature. Our model jointly captures preference interdependence over utilities (benevolence) and actions (nosiness). We apply the model to two well‐known environments. The first is a classic social choice problem; the second is a model of relative consumption concerns. For the former we characterize the existence of the impossibility once the social choice problem has been modeled as a behavioral game. For the latter we characterize when the negative externality arising from relative consumption concerns can be overcome without a policy intervention.

We consider collective choice with agents possessing strictly monotone, strictly convex and continuous preferences over a compact and convex constraint set contained in +k . If it is non-empty the core will lie on the efficient boundary of the constraint set and any policy not in the core is beaten by some policy on the efficient boundary. It is possible to translate the collective choice problem on this efficient boundary to another social choice problem on a compact and convex subset of +c (c<k) with strictly convex and continuous preferences. In this setting the dimensionality results in Banks (1995) and Saari (1997) apply to the dimensionality of the boundary of the constraint set (which is lower than the dimensionality of the choice space by at least one). If the constraint set is not convex then the translated lower dimensional problem does not necessarily involve strict convexity of preferences but the dimensionality of the problem is still lower. Broadly, the results show that the homogeneity afforded by strict monotonicity of preferences and a compact constraint set makes generic core emptyness slightly less common. One example of the results is that if preferences are strictly monotone and convex on 2 then choice on a compact and convex constraint exhibits a version of the median voter theorem.

The theory of social choice is concerned with the problem of aggregating the preferences of several persons into a single preference order. The problem has the same structure as that of aggregating the preference orders of a single person with regard to several aspects of alternatives into a single preference order on the set of alternatives. For this reason, the theory of social choice comes logically not under the topic of collective action (as one might suppose) but rather under the topic of multi-objective decisions. This is so because the several participants in a situation defined as a problem of social choice do not really select courses of action among several available ones when they present their preference orders on a set of alternatives. Therefore they are not ‘actors’, as actors are defined in the theory of decision. To be sure, there are situations where voters do choose strategies, that is, choose among different preference orders to present, which may or may not represent their true preferences but which they believe will be more likely to lead to a more desirable aggregated order. These situations can be considered as n-person decision problems, and we will examine them in the context of non-cooperative n-person games (see Chapter 14. At this time, however, we will suppose that each voter acts ‘sincerely’, that is, presents his ‘actual’ preference order. The decision is now up to some agency, which must combine all these submitted preference orders into a ‘social’ preference order.KeywordsSocial ChoicePreference OrderPareto OptimalitySocial Welfare FunctionSimple MajorityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Self-optimality and efficiency in utility distortion games

‘Hydraulic’ rationing

Design imposes a novel social choice problem: using a team of voting agents, maximize the number of optimal solutions; allowing a user to then take an aesthetical choice. In an open system of design agents, team formation is fundamental. We present the first model of agent teams for design. For maximum applicability, we envision agents that are queried for a single opinion, and multiple solutions are obtained by multiple iterations. We show that diverse teams composed of agents with different preferences maximize the number of optimal solutions, while uniform teams composed of multiple copies of the best agent are in general suboptimal. Our experiments study the model in bounded time; and we also study a real system, where agents vote to design buildings.

Crowdsourcing is an important tool, e.g., in computational linguistics and computer vision, to efficiently label large amounts of data using nonexpert annotators. The individual annotations collected need to be aggregated into a single collective annotation. The hope is that the quality of this collective annotation will be comparable to that of a traditionally sourced expert annotation. In practice, most scientists working with crowdsourcing methods use simple majority voting to aggregate their data, although some have also used probabilistic models and treated aggregation as a problem of maximum likelihood estimation. The observation that the aggregation step in a collective annotation exercise may be considered a problem of social choice has only been made very recently. Following up on this observation, we show that the axiomatic method, as practiced in social choice theory, can make a contribution to this important domain and we develop an axiomatic framework for collective annotation, focusing amongst other things on the notion of an annotator's bias. We complement our theoretical study with a discussion of a crowdsourcing experiment using data from dialogue modelling in computational linguistics.

This paper establishes a clear connection between equilibrium theory, game theory and social choice theory by showing that, for a well defined social choice problem, a condition which is necessary and sufficient to solve this problem — limited arbitrage — is the same as the condition which is necessary and sufficient to establish the existence of an equilibrium and the core. The connection is strengthened by establishing that a market allocation, which is in the core, can always be realized as a social allocation, i.e. an allocation which is optimal according to an ordering chosen by a social choice rule. Limited arbitrage characterizes those economies without Condorcet triples, and those for which Arrow’s paradox can be resolved on choices of large utility values.KeywordsSocial ChoiceSocial PreferenceCompetitive EquilibriumPareto FrontierSocial Choice RuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

One of the most exciting areas in economic theory is the study of incentives. Within this rubric a broad range of problems are currently being addressed. They range from the problems of social choice, to the economics of planning, to the character of labor contracts. The central theme of the research agenda concerns how the incentive structure affects the quality of information agents are willing to communicate. The principal question concerns how truthful revelation of information can be induced.1 Such questions are important whenever agents can profit from distorting information. The problem thus arises in all sorts of guises in economics. The purpose of this essay is to illustrate this point by focusing on three distinct areas, social choice, public finance, and economic planning.

There are alternative ways of decomposing a given fuzzy weak preference relation into its antisymmetric and symmetric components. In this paper I have provided support to one among these alternative specifications. It is shown that on this specification the fuzzy analogue of the General Possibility Theorem is valid even when the transitivity restrictions on the individual and the social preference relations are relatively weak. In the special case where the individual preference relations are exact but the social preference relation is permitted to be fuzzy it is possible to distinguish between different degrees of power of the dictator. This power increases with the strength of the transitivity requirement.