A method of competition result evaluation based on social choice theory

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

and overview: Social decision making on technological projects.- Social choice theory and practice.- Promoting personal decisions supporting the achievement of risky public goods.- Cognitive dimensions of conflicts over new technology.- Approaches towards conflict resolution in decision processes.- Requisite decision modelling for technological projects.- Value oriented social decision analysis: a communication tool for public decision making on technological projects.- Contributing to social decision methodology: citizen reports on technological projects.- Computer assisted group decision making.- Technological risk, policy theories and public perception in connection with the siting of hazardous facilities.- Planning and procedural aspects of the windfarm project of the Dutch Electricty Generating Board.- Current radioactive waste management policy in the Netherlands.- Nuclear waste: public perception and siting policy.- Designing technological hazard information programs: towards a model of risk-adaptive decision making.- Decision making in technological emergencies.- Social decision making on technological projects: review of key issues and a recommended procedure.- Author index.- Appendix: Authors' Addresses.

Previous articleNext article No AccessArrow's Theorem, Indeterminacy, and Multiplicity Reconsidered*Mathias RisseMathias Risse Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 111, Number 4July 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/233570 Views: 53Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Henrik D. Kugelberg Social choice problems with public reason proceduralism, Economics and Philosophy 38, no.11 (Feb 2021): 51–70.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267120000498Wesley H. Holliday, Eric Pacuit Axioms for defeat in democratic elections, Journal of Theoretical Politics 33, no.44 (Nov 2021): 475–524.https://doi.org/10.1177/09516298211043236Hannu Nurmi The Incidence of Some Voting Paradoxes Under Domain Restrictions, Group Decision and Negotiation 29, no.66 (Aug 2020): 1107–1120.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-020-09697-9Adiel Teixeira de Almeida, Danielle Costa Morais, Hannu Nurmi More Than Two Alternatives, (Oct 2019): 21–30.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30955-8_4Eerik Lagerspetz Interpretations, (Jan 2016): 247–340.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23261-4_5MARK A. BURGMAN, HELEN M. REGAN, LYNN A. MAGUIRE, MARK COLYVAN, JAMES JUSTUS, TARA G. MARTIN, KRIS ROTHLEY Voting Systems for Environmental Decisions, Conservation Biology 28, no.22 (Jan 2014): 322–332.https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12209Rosa Camps, Xavier Mora, Laia Saumell A continuous rating method for preferential voting. The incomplete case, Social Choice and Welfare 40, no.44 (Apr 2012): 1111–1142.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-012-0663-5Aki Lehtinen A welfarist critique of social choice theory, Journal of Theoretical Politics 23, no.33 (Jul 2011): 359–381.https://doi.org/10.1177/0951629811411753Mathias Risse On the Philosophy of Group Decision Methods I: The Nonobviousness of Majority Rule, Philosophy Compass 4, no.55 (Sep 2009): 793–802.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2009.00224.xMathias Risse On the Philosophy of Group Decision Methods II: Alternatives to Majority Rule, Philosophy Compass 4, no.55 (Sep 2009): 803–812.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2009.00225.xArnold Shepperson An economy of impossibility: a preliminary study for an ordinal approach to research methods in cultural studies, Critical Arts 22, no.22 (Nov 2008): 333–357.https://doi.org/10.1080/02560040802472492Joel Parker Peter Emerson, ed., Designing an All-Inclusive Democracy: Consensual Voting Procedures For Use in Parliaments, Councils and Committees, Public Choice 135, no.3-43-4 (Nov 2007): 493–496.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-007-9261-yMathias Risse On the Philosophy of Group Decision Methods I: The Non-Obviousness of Majority Rule, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2008).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1296638MARC FLEURBAEY SOCIAL CHOICE AND JUST INSTITUTIONS: NEW PERSPECTIVES, Economics and Philosophy 23, no.11 (Mar 2007): 15–43.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267107001204Donald G. Saari Which is better: the Condorcet or Borda winner?, Social Choice and Welfare 26, no.11 (Jan 2006): 107–129.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0046-2Mathias Risse Why the count de Borda cannot beat the Marquis de Condorcet, Social Choice and Welfare 25, no.11 (Nov 2005): 95–113.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-005-0045-3Gerry Mackie Democracy Defended, 20 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511490293 by Donald G. Saari Capturing the “Will of the People” Saari, Ethics 113, no.22 (Jul 2015): 333–349.https://doi.org/10.1086/342857

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Narrowly understood, social choice theory is a specialized branch of applied logic and mathematics that analyzes abstract objects called preference aggregation functions, social welfare functions, and social choice functions. But more broadly, social choice theory identifies, analyzes, and evaluates rules that may be used to make collective decisions. So understood, social choice is a subfield of the social sciences that examines what may be called “voting rules” of various sorts. While social choice theory typically assumes a finite set of alternatives over which voter preferences are unrestricted, the spatial model of social choice assumes that policy alternatives can be represented by points in a space of one or more dimensions, and that voters have preferences that are plausibly shaped by this spatial structure.Social choice theory has considerable relevance for the study of legislative (as well as electoral) institutions. The concepts and tools of social choice theory make possible formal descriptions of legislative institutions such as bicameralism, parliamentary voting procedures, effects of decision rules (e.g., supramajority vs. simple majority rule and executive veto rules), sincere vs. strategic voting by legislators, agenda control, and other parliamentary maneuvers. Spatial models of social choice further enrich this analysis and raise additional questions regarding policy stability and change. Spatial models are used increasingly to guide empirical research on legislative institutions and processes.

We present a method for using standard techniques from satisfiability checking to automatically verify and discover theorems in an area of economic theory known as ranking sets of objects. The key question in this area, which has important applications in social choice theory and decision making under uncertainty, is how to extend an agent's preferences over a number of objects to a preference relation over nonempty sets of such objects. Certain combinations of seemingly natural principles for this kind of preference extension can result in logical inconsistencies, which has led to a number of important impossibility theorems. We first prove a general result that shows that for a wide range of such principles, characterised by their syntactic form when expressed in a many-sorted first-order logic, any impossibility exhibited at a fixed (small) domain size will necessarily extend to the general case. We then show how to formulate candidates for impossibility theorems at a fixed domain size in propositional logic, which in turn enables us to automatically search for (general) impossibility theorems using a SAT solver. When applied to a space of 20 principles for preference extension familiar from the literature, this method yields a total of 84 impossibility theorems, including both known and nontrivial new results.

Judgment aggregation is a recent theory that combines aggregation problems previously studied by social choice theory with logic. Social choice theory is a vast subject, including not only the study of preference aggregation and voting theory but also topics like social welfare and justice. Given the tight links between judgment aggregation and preference aggregation, in this first chapter we give a concise survey on some historical aspects of preference aggregation and then introduce and motivate the more recent field of judgment aggregation. The chapter builds on [Sen99, Sen86, Bla58] for the historical overview on social choice theory, and on [KS93, Kor92] for the informal introduction to judgment aggregation.

This Chapter extends the ideas deal with description of individual opinions and social decisions that were briefly presented in Chapter 1. Section 2.2 investigates various types of binary relations and defines the notion of pair-dominant, or rationalizable by a binary relation, choice. In this Section main types of binary relations used in social choice theory are defined — linear orders, weak orders, strict partial orders, and acyclic relations. Section 2.3 gives another well-known concept of choice, based on the ‘extremization paradigm’ — that of a choice function rationalizable by some numerical (utility) function, studies the classical unicriterial and multicriterial choice models. We study three different types of multicriteral models — Paretian, weak Paretian, and joint-extremal ones. The equivalence of Paretian and weak Paretian models is shown. Section 2.4 lists Expansion-Contraction Axioms (rationality conditions) for choice functions, and studies their mutual relations. The axioms of Heredity, Concordance, Outcast, Arrow’s Choice Axiom in different versions, Choice Monotonicity, Choice Resolutness are studied. Section 2.5 establishes relations between the classes of rationalizable choice functions and the domains in the space of choice functions described in Section 2.4. The classical pair-dominant choice functions are shown to define a small, but important part of the models describing individual opinions and social decisions. Section 2.6 contains concluding remarks and gives a guide to the literature.

Computational social choice is a new interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of social choice theory and computer science that studies computational aspects of social choice mechanisms as well as applications of social choice ideas in the design and analysis of computing systems. Research on computational social choice now encompasses a variety of topics, including the algorithmic aspects of voting rules, computational barriers to strategic behaviour, collective decision-making in multi-agent systems, preference elicitation and communication issues in voting, fair division, computational aspects of weighted voting games, collective decision-making in combinatorial domains, logic-based formalisms for social choice problems, belief and judgement aggregation, and social software. The aim of this special issue is to build on the spectacular success of two workshops on computational social choice (COMSOC’06, Amsterdam and COMSOC’08, Liverpool), and provide a forum for reseachers in the area to present their ideas on a variety of topics. This special issue is composed of nine research articles and a short note that span a fairly wide range of issues, including voting, mechanism design, judgment aggregation, and fairness, and a similarly wide range of techniques, such as logic, experiments, and computational complexity. The paper by Agotnes, van der Hoek and Wooldridge defines a new modal logic for representing and reasoning about preference and judgment aggregation. The authors show that their logic can be used to express a variety of concepts and results from the social choice domain, including majority voting, the discursive paradox, Arrow’s theorem and Condorcet’s paradox. Baharad, Goldberger, Koppel and Nitzan propose a maximum likelihood estimation-based approach for aggregating voters’ opinions over several issues. They argue that their method is vastly superior to simple majority voting, and use both analytical and empirical evaluation to support their argument. Balan, Richards and Luke deal with the problem of selecting a sequence of actions when the actions have multiple beneficiaries. Their goal is to select the actions according to a lexicographic fairness criterion. The explore the complexity of this problem for both finite and infinite sequences of actions and present both algorithms and intractability results for this problem. The paper by Caminada and Pigozzi applies argumentation theory to judgment aggregation, and proposes aggregation operators satisfying not only the usual property of collective rationality, but another highly desirable property,

Computational social choice is an interdisciplinary field of study at the interface of social choice theory and computer science, with knowledge flowing in either direction. On the one hand, computational social choice is concerned with importing concepts and procedures from social choice theory for solving questions that arise in computer science and AI application domains. This is typically the case for managing societies of autonomous agents, which calls for negotiation and voting procedures. On the other hand, computational social choice is concerned with importing notions and methods from computer science for solving questions originally stemming from social choice, for instance by providing new perspectives on the problem of manipulation and control in elections. This Dagstuhl Seminar has been devoted to the presentation of recent results and an exchange of ideas in this growing research field.

One of the goals of social choice theory is to study the group decision methods that satisfy two types of desiderata. The first type ensures that the group decision depends in the right way on the voters’ opinions. The second type ensures that the voters are free to express any opinion, as long as it is an admissible input to the group decision method. Impossibility theorems, such as Arrow’s Theorem, point to an interesting tension between these two desiderata. In this paper, we argue that dependence and independence logic offer an interesting new perspective on this aspect of social choice theory. To that end, we develop a version of independence logic that can express Arrow’s properties of preference aggregation functions. We then prove that Arrow’s Theorem is derivable in a natural deduction system for the first-order consequences of our logic.

Paper presents the result of a scientific experiment in which multi-criteria decision-making tools and a method from the social choice theory are used for solving typical agricultural problem: selecting a cattle food supplier in presence of five typical criteria. Four decision makers took part in this experiment came from different interest sectors (food industry, science, academy and private ownership), and they expectedly demonstrated different attitudes, interests and evaluation capacities. Four recognized national animal food suppliers are evaluated with respect to their performance in offering acceptable costs, food quality, supply reliability, prestige on the market and payment conditions. Decision-making methods involved are Compromise Programming and TOPSIS. A social choice method Borda count is used to aggregate individual rankings obtained by the decision makers into the group decision. Combination of multi-criteria and social choice methods described in this work at proof-of-concept level recommends itself as a trustful practice in related agricultural business.

Sports tournaments provide a procedure for producing a champion and ranking the contestants based on game results. As such, tournaments mirror aggregation methods in social choice theory, where diverse individual preferences are put together to form an overall social preference. This connection allows us a novel way of conceptualizing sports tournaments, their results, and significance. I argue that there are genuine intransitive dominance relationships in sports, that social choice theory provides a framework for understanding rankings in such situations and that these considerations provide a new reason to endorse championship pluralism.

Geographical AnalysisVolume 15, Issue 3 p. 205-211 Free Access Majority Voting and the Location of Salutary Public Facilities Fred M. Shelley, Fred M. Shelley Fred M. Shelley is assistant professor of geography, University of Oklahoma.Search for more papers by this authorMichael F. Goodchild, Michael F. Goodchild Michael F. Goodchild is professor of geography, University of Western Ontario. The helpful comments of Daniel Fesenmaier, Diane Whalley, Frank Stetzer, Sally McLafferty, Avijit Ghosh, and two anonymous referees on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.Search for more papers by this author Fred M. Shelley, Fred M. Shelley Fred M. Shelley is assistant professor of geography, University of Oklahoma.Search for more papers by this authorMichael F. Goodchild, Michael F. Goodchild Michael F. Goodchild is professor of geography, University of Western Ontario. The helpful comments of Daniel Fesenmaier, Diane Whalley, Frank Stetzer, Sally McLafferty, Avijit Ghosh, and two anonymous referees on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.Search for more papers by this author First published: July 1983 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4632.1983.tb00782.xCitations: 2 Michael F. Goodchild is professor of geography, University of Western Ontario. The helpful comments of Daniel Fesenmaier, Diane Whalley, Frank Stetzer, Sally McLafferty, Avijit Ghosh, and two anonymous referees on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat LITERATURE CITED Black, D. (1948). “On the Rationale of Group Decision Making. Journal of Political Economy, 56, 23– 34. Hansen, P., and J.-E Thisse (1981). “Outcomes of Voting and Planning: Condorcet, Weber, and Rawls Locations. Journal of Public Economics, 16, 1– 15. Kramer, G. (1973). “On a Class of Equilibrium Conditions for Majority Rule. Econometrica, 41, 255– 97. Rushton, G., S. L. McLafferty, and A. Ghosh (1981). “Optimum Locations for Public Services: Individual Preferences and Social Choice. Geographical Analysis, 13, 196– 202. Sen, A. (1977). “Social Choice Theory: A Re-Examination. Econometrica, 45, 53– 89. Tellier, L.-N. (1972). “The Weber Problem: Solution and Interpretation. Geographical Analysis, 4, 215– 33. Wendell, R. E., and R. D. McKelvey (1981). “New Perspectives in Competitive Location Theory. European Journal of Operational Research, 6, 174– 82. Citing Literature Volume15, Issue3July 1983Pages 205-211 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Gene-environment correlation (rGE) occurs when an individual's genotype determines its choice of environment, generating a correlation between environment and genotype frequency. In particular, social rGE, caused by genetic variation in social environment choice, can critically determine both individual development and the course of social selection. Despite its foundational role in social evolution and developmental psychology theory, natural genetic variation in social environment choice has scarcely been examined empirically. Drosophila melanogaster provides an ideal system for investigating social rGE. Flies live socially in nature and have many opportunities to make social decisions; and natural, heterozygous genotypes may be replicated, enabling comparisons between genotypes across environments. Using this approach, I show that all aspects of social environment choice vary among natural genotypes, demonstrating pervasive social rGE. Surprisingly, genetic variation in group-size preference was density dependent, indicating that the behavioral and evolutionary consequences of rGE may depend on the context in which social decisions are made. These results provide the first detailed investigation of social rGE, and illustrate that that genetic variation may influence organismal performance by specifying the environment in which traits are expressed.

Towards a theory of MCDM: stepping away from social choice theory