Social Decision Methodology for Technological Projects

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.

In this conference we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Social Choice and Individual Values" by Kenneth Arrow [14]. Fyodor Dostoevski once said that the literature of the second half of the 19th century grew out of Nikolai Gogol's short novel, "An Overcoat." To paraphrase Dostoevski, we can say that the theory of social choice after 1951 grew out of "Social Choice and Individual Values." Although social decisions are universal, very little work was completed in Russia and the Soviet Union on the theoiy of social choice up until recent times. Thus I am first going to discuss briefly the histoiy of social choice in Russia. I restrict myself to the period up to 1 991 , since I believe this was the year in which a new era in Russian history began. The development of social choice after 1991 is a subject for future investigation.

In recent years, with the emergence of new technologies, incidents caused by technology occur frequently, and it causes a high degree of public concern. The consequences brought by the application of new technologies cause extreme public panic and worry, mistrust of government, experts, businesses, research institutions and other serious impact on mutual exchange and communication. How to balance the relationship between the interests groups, eliminate the public concern on engineering and technical risk, and improve the level of public's perception of risk, become the most urgent problem. Taking Liulitun incineration plant as an example, this paper surveys and analyzes the public's understanding on relevant technical and engineering construction, and studies the factors that influence public's perceptions of risk. It also explores ways of strengthening the communication channel beteween relevant department and the public so as to improve public's overall perception of risk fundamentally.

The size and quality of this two-volume special issue in honor of Salvador Barbera speaks to the wide scope of his contributions as a friend, co-author, mentor, and builder. We begin by framing some of Salvador’s important research contributions. The theory of social choice is at the very center of economic analysis. In the late 1960s, following various contributions by William Vickrey, Robin Farquharson, Edward Clarke, Ted Groves, Alan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite, the notion of strategy-proofness took form and, together with ideas emerging in game theory, produced an “economics of incentives”. This line of research became among the most fruitful work in all of social science of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Salvador Barbera is among the most influential scholars in this line of research, particularly on the voting models side. He stands among the world leaders. In particular, Salvador Barbera’s work on strategy-proofness has been of fundamental importance and he has made several seminal contributions. These begin with papers that follow from his Ph.D. thesis and are particularly concerned with strategyproofness when one allows some randomization in outcomes. Those papers helped uncover the role of chance or randomization in social decisions, and showed the limited extent to which that can help in mitigating individual incentives for manipulation. That work has recently sparked a series of interesting follow-up papers. Salvador’s other important works on strategy-proofness in such rich domains include insightful proofs based on pivotal voter arguments and extensions to infinite settings (in work with Bezalel Peleg).

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.

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.

Competition results are traditionally decided based on referees' rating scores. However, due to the inconsistent evaluation standard and the different subjective wishes of referees, the evaluation results will be affected to some extent. Thus, the objectivity of competition results will be reduced. We propose a method by using referees' preference ordering for players instead of traditional scores to evaluate the competition result. We constructs a relationship of referees' preferences for players and calculates players' overall ranking based on social choice theory and group decision. By constructing a directed graph and calculating the value of strongest path, we can improve the objectivity of result evaluation and the difficulty of manipulating competition results. We proved that the proposed method satisfies the criteria of fairness, consistency, maneuverability and monotonicity. Competition results will not be changed due to individual referees' preferences, so we can obtain a more reasonable result. We make a theoretical analysis and a comprehensive experimental study using real datasets to verify the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Studies have demonstrated the inadequacy of relying on existing administrative boundaries or simple proximity to define an affected community. The proposal and siting of hazardous facilities can have a range of impacts upon people across wide areas, with some more affected than others as a result of living with the physical impacts of construction or the fear associated with perceived risk. We term those most affected the directly affected population and propose a two-stage model for identifying an affected community which places those most affected at the centre of the definition. The second stage is to identify the relationships those most affected have with the wider elements of the sense of community to discover the existing community or communities which are affected. Illustrated by the siting of a low-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Dounrey in the north of Scotland, we show that elements of the lived community experience may have very different shapes, extents and conflicting interests which pose challenges for their incorporation into a siting process. The two-stage model presented in this paper, by placing those most directly affected at the centre and working from there out into the existing communities, identifies issues early in any siting process to improve their incorporation and amelioration.

System Engineering (SE) projects encompass knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive problem solving and decision making activities among interdisciplinary teams. Management of knowledge emerging in previous SE projects is vital for organizational process improvement. To fully exploit this intellectual capital, it must be made explicit and shared among system engineers. In this context, we propose a knowledge modelling framework for system engineering projects. Our main objective is to provide a semantic description for knowledge items created and/or used in system engineering processes in order to facilitate their reuse. The framework is based on a set of layered ontologies where entities such as domain concepts, actors, decision processes, artefacts, are interlinked to capture explicit as well as implicit engineering project knowledge.

bioSUSTAINABILITY is one of three scientific core project of DIVERSITAS.It comprises three interrelated focuses:evaluating the effectiveness of current measures for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity;social,political and economic drivers of biodiversity loss;social choice and decision making about conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.This paper introduces science plan and implementation strategy of bioSUSTAINABILITY,simply analyses the important role of its for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Chapter 6 Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth

In contrast to a social choice function, a social choice procedure is proposed which depends both on the way a set of alternatives is broken up into the subsets and the sequence in which each of these subsets is taken up for consideration. This article investigates the Arrow question in this generalized framework.

The failure of Nirex's application to construct a Rock Characterisation Facility at Sellafield has led to some rethinking on the public's perception of the issues involved in radioactive waste management. This paper proposes that the importance of creating the right public impression has been grossly underestimated in the past because science has been left to the scientists. It has been assumed that a scientific consensus will be achieved and that the public will accept its findings. The reality is that the public are far more sophisticated in their perception of the issues. The paper goes on to explore the factors shaping public perception and proposes some possible solutions to help the public buy into the problem.

Petrochemical clusters are forms of industrialization that use compounds and polymers derived directly or indirectly from gas or crude oil for chemical applications. They pose a variety of short- and long-term risks to the environment and the people who live nearby. The aim of this study is to determine whether there is a correlation between the degree of perceived technological risk and the emotional value generated by the contemplation of the petrochemical industry landscape in order to try to establish strategic lines of action to mitigate the perception of risk and improve the emotional well-being of the population. This study uses manipulated pictures and a Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) survey to assess changes in perception and emotional response in residents in Teheran (Iran). Key findings show an insignificant relationship between technological risk and landscape value perception in both original and manipulated pictures. However, taking into account that, in general, in manipulated pictures, there is a more significant relationship, designing the landscape could help to mitigate the technological risk perception. This study contributes to the broader discussion about industrialization and its environmental and social consequences. It emphasizes the importance of considering public perception when planning and developing industrial areas, so as to balance industrial functionality and environmental and aesthetic considerations for long-term urban development.

<p>近年來，學者認為，行為決策的偏差導因於情緒-認知歷程間的失衡，哥倫比亞卡片任務(CCT)因此 被提出用以測量個人在風險決策中的情緒和認知歷程，但至今該任務測量的建構效度如何，仍不清楚， 並且原任務設計除了在實施上較為複雜且耗時外，在決策歷程中也僅考量分數的得失變化，未考量社會 因素(如:同儕與社會酬賞)對青少年風險決策歷程的影響。本研究主要目的在於，參考與修正(簡 化)原CCT任務設計，並增加同儕決策的社會參照與同儕認同的社會酬賞情境設計於修正版的CCT風險 決策任務中，衡鑑該社會風險決策任務的建構效度。本研究以269位八年級學生為對象，採多層次驗證 性因素分析考量資料巢套結構對分析結果的影響。研究結果顯示:(1)簡化後的原CCT任務可有效激 發情緒與認知歷程。(2)融入社會因素的CCT任務亦能有效激發社會參照與社會酬賞對決策的影響。 (3)本研究編修的社會風險決策任務具有良好的建構效度。根據研究結果，未來研究可運用該測量工 具，理解青少年行為的風險決策對認知與行為表現的影響。</p> <p> </p><p>Risky decisions increase with age and reach peaks in adolescence and early adulthood before declining again during adulthood. Although risky decisions are commonly made by adolescents, it may have long-term negative impacts on life later. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), proposed about three decades ago, is the most common task used to investigate risky decision-making. It was developed based on the somatic marker hypothesis, which assumed that individuals’ behaviors are implicitly influenced by reward and punishment experiences, and these experiences would send emotional information to drive individuals’ decision-making behaviors toward beneficial long-term directions. However, only the emotional decision-making process was addressed in IGT, which may not sufficiently account for adolescents’ risky decision processes. Recently, cognitive neuroscience research suggested that risky decision-making involves two systems in the brain. Risky decision-making increases between childhood and adolescence as a result of changes around the time of puberty of the brain’s socio-emotional system that leads to increased reward-seeking, especially when peers are present. The socio-emotional system has been shown to rely on the ventral tegmentum area, subcortical structures (ventral striatum and amygdala) and cortical structures (the insular and medial/orbital frontal cortex). This system is operated automatically based on similarity and contiguity, and behavior is influenced by emotional impulse. Risky decision-making decreases between adolescence and adulthood because of changes in the brain’s cognitive-control system – changes which improve individuals’ ability for self-control, which occur gradually and over the course of adolescence and young adulthood. The cognitive-control system is assumed to rely on the dorsal and ventral area of the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex. The differing timetables of these two brain systems make mid-adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability to make risky decisions. Consequently, researchers tended to argue that biased behavioral decision making was due to an imbalance between emotion and cognition processes. The Columbia Card Task (CCT) was proposed to measure individuals’ emotion and cognition processes in decision making. However, the construct validity of this measurement was unclear, and it was not only complex and time- consuming in the implementation of the original task design but also considered the changes of scores instead of including the effects of social factors (i.e., peers and social reward) on decision making processes. The main purpose of this study was referring and revising (simplifying) the original design of CCT and adding other tasks that incorporated social reference of peers’ decisions and social rewards of recognition into a revised CCT task to evaluate the construct validity of this social risky decision-making task. There were 269 eighth graders who consented to participate in this study, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to take into account nesting structure. The results showed: (1) The original design of CCT with minor revisions (reducing decision options from three to two) was effective in eliciting emotion and cognition processes. (2) Simplified CCT tasks incorporating social factors were also effective in eliciting the effects of social reference and social reward. (3) The social risky decision-making task held good construct validity. Future studies are encouraged to utilize this measurement to understand the effects of adolescents’ risky decision-making on cognition and behavior. For guidance and counseling practices, it is encouraged to understand the extent of risky decision-making for adolescents through present tasks to identify adolescents who are vulnerable to make risky decisions as early as possible and to regularly show care and help through guidance and counseling. Moreover, clarifying which adolescents are more likely to make risky decisions because of the presence of peers or social rewards helps to understand the potential impacts of risky decisions under different decision conditions. This study is beneficial for guidance and counseling practitioners to provide more precise interventions.</p> <p> </p>