The Optimality of the Expert and Majority Rules Under Exponentially Distributed Competence

The paper introduces the concept of polar decision rules and establishes that majority rules are polar rules. We identify second best rules and penultimate rules in cases that majority rules are optimal or the most inferior, respectively. We especially specify the almost expert rule and the almost majority rule as the secondary rules of the expert and majority rules, respectively.

A decision-making body may utilize a wide variety of different strategies when required to make a collective decision. In principle, we would like to use the most effective decision rule, that is, the rule yielding the highest probability of making the correct decision. However, in reality we often have to choose a decision rule out of some restricted family of rules. Therefore, it is important to be able to rank various families of rules. In this paper we consider three classes of decision rules: (i) balanced expert rules, (ii) the so-called single expert rules, and (iii) restricted majority rules. For the first two classes, we show that, as we deviate from the best rule in the family, the effectiveness of the decision rule decreases. For the last class, we obtain a very different phenomenon: any inner ranking is possible.

This work investigates the robustness of optimal decision rules under a changing size of a decision group where the competence of one member is outstanding while the others possess an identical competence. More specifically, we focus on the expert rule, the almost expert rule and the tie-breaking chairperson rule. We first establish criteria for the optimality of each of these rules and then use it to investigate their robustness. Robustness is an important property of decision rules, especially when cost of adjustment to a new rule is high. Our findings are that the expert rule and the chairperson rule are robust while the almost expert rule is not.

We have observed that some recent results cast serious doubts uponthe applicability of majority rule as a device for forming a group-willout of individual wills. On the other hand, majority rule has manyproperties to recommend it. Especially, the decisiveness propertyshould please anyone interested in efficiency considerations. How-ever, when it comes to the second major criterion, consistency, major-ity rule with pairwise comparison of alternatives often leads to diffi-culties. Indeed, we have seen that there is typically no core or Con-dorcet winner when the policy space is multidimensional real space.And when there is no core, the situation looks grim indeed for major-ity rule: literally any outcome may become the majority winner. Somerelief of this very strong result is provided by the fact that no majoritycycles can go through the outcomes that belong to the M2 bargainingset. This finding, of course, solves the problem facing majority rule onlyinsofar as a method can be devised by which the M2 bargaining set out-comes can be determined in a reliable way. Here, thus, we are con-fronted with the sincerity problem. The absence of the core can lead to chaotic trajectories of votingoutcomes in multidimensional space. However, there are ways of over-coming the difficulties if a sufficient amount of flexibility is allowedin institutional design. If we consider the various nonequilibrium solu-tion concepts, and the minimax set in particular, we can always designa decision rule which (under mild restrictions) makes the vote-maximiz-ing outcome trajectory enter the solution set. The flexibility needed isgreat, indeed: the decision rule, λ-majority, must be alterable for eachvoting situation. The determination of the winner in a pair-wise comparison of alter-natives is not the main source of the difficulties surrounding majorityrule. As a matter of fact, the method of building the agenda is the mostcrucial part of the problem of cyclical majorities. In multicandidatecontests the occurrence of cyclical majorities has motivated the studyof other.decision procedures in addition to the majority comparisonof alternatives. The most recent proposal, approval voting, is morestrategyproof than its competitors in the class of single-ballot, non-ranked voting systems. At the moment the relationships betweenapproval voting and majority rule are not clear. It seems that furtherstudy of the interrelationships of these procedures is called for. Thefeatures in which approval voting is superior to majority comparisonof pairs of alternatives, however, are not, strictly speaking, procedural,but are external to the method of making collective decisions.

Icelandic politics in 2021 were strongly dominated by two features: the ongoing struggle with Covid‐19 and the parliamentary election which took place on 25 September. Covid‐19 was in many ways the primary task of government throughout the year and, while criticism of various restrictions of personal freedoms grew louder as the year wore on, the situation remained relatively calm compared to most other countries. The parliamentary election was to a certain extent overshadowed by the pandemic crisis and the opposition parties in particular had a difficult time of finding a clear voice in a situation where expert rule was the norm and by far the most prominent part of the government agenda. After four years in power, the three‐way coalition of the Left‐Greens, Independence Party and Progressive Party was re‐elected in September, signalling a continuation of the partial return to stability which its formation in 2017 had signalled.

So far we have been concerned with various problems that were due mainly to the heterogeneity in individual preferences. However, various problems associated with the aggregation of individual decisions also arise when individuals share identical preferences, but have to make decisions given their different decisional capabilities. The problem of aggregating individual decisions under an uncertain dichotomous choice setting had already been studied in the eighteenth century and in recent years it has attracted continuous renewed interest. The last two chapters are devoted to various aspects of this problem.

Previous research has indicated sex differences in style of interaction for members in small groups. It was assumed that some of these sex differences could be attributed to demand characteristics in relation to specific topics discussed by group members in earlier investigations. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relative importance of two such demand characteristics, decision rule (consensus rule vs. majority rule), and decision consequence (high vs. low consequences), in addition to the sex composition of the group membership. Adherence to the group decision was also studied. On a topic previously rated as important, 16 four-person groups of males and the same number of female groups met and deliberated on a decision regarding an academic policy. Later these undergraduate students indicated their preference on the decision topic. The results showed male—female differences not accounted for by decision rule, decision consequence, or group decision post-test change. Explanation of the sex differences was offered in terms of varying academic aspiration levels and incongruency with attained academic achievement. The results also lend partial support for the importance of some operating demand characteristics, as yet unidentified.

Bayesian Analysis of Agricultural Drainage Problems in California's San Joaquin Valley

The purpose of economic decision rules is to guide decision makers who have competing goals or are uncertain about how their goals can be fulfilled. This chapter discusses the assumptions underlying major decision rules such as expected utility maximization, discounting of future events, maximin, and various types of efficiency criteria including cost effectiveness and Pareto efficiency. All of these decision rules impose restrictions on the information to be taken into account, and since these restrictions are value laden, so are the decision rules. However, in the process of applying decision rules, the value assumptions are often put out of sight instead of being brought forward and discussed.

The paper explores the effectiveness of the major decision rules commonly applied to the selection of investment alternatives. The rules are applied to a continual stream of simulated investments, as they arise period by period throughout the planning horizon. Thus the dynamics of investing now rather than later, with capital rationing, are taken into account. The practitioners' preference for the payback period is examined for a typical series of simulated investments, and the returns are compared against the returns of the more academically acceptable discounting decision rules. Particular attention is devoted to the benefits of each of the decision rules with reference to both risk and average returns.

Climate change, biodiversity losses, global health threats, changing recreation patterns are but a few of the many challenges that currently, and for some time to come, the world has to cope with. To address these challenges and to mitigate some of them, ecosystem and particularly conservation management increasingly have to adopt strategies never considered before. One such new possibility is crowdsourcing, a variant of public consultation, where a number of experts are invited and, for example, asked to mark trees that – in their opinion – should be removed in order to improve or restore a forest ecosystem. This type of crowdsourcing has recently been carried out in many European countries and overseas as part of what commonly is referred to as marteloscope. In this paper, we addressed the question of how the rating or voting of such a crowd of experts is best aggregated to obtain one final, consolidated list of trees to be evicted. Standard approval voting often leads to a domination by the majority of voters and important contributions by minority experts are largely ignored. To avoid this and to better represent the pluralism of expertise and opinions in matters, where currently no best-practice guidelines exist, we analysed the effects of three proportional multiwinner rules used in political science by applying them to 50 marteloscope experiments in Great Britain. Our results indicated that proportional rules – particularly in situations where the invited expert markers disagree – achieved a better representation of different opinions than standard approval voting. Proportional rules also act as a safety mechanism reducing risks when the majority decisions prove inappropriate and as a consequence forest development could completely go astray.

Organizational theory is in a poor state today. Supporting this claim, an article in Nature in 2011 listed the top challenges, including at fifth, the inability by social scientists to aggregate individual data to group, organizational and system levels. We have proposed that this failure derives from treating interdependence as a hindrance to experimental replications rather than the primary characteristic of social behavior. Recent studies have shown that bistability can be used theoretically to explain states of interdependence common to group debates preceding a decision (e.g., interdependently speaking and listening, and reacting). The goal of this study is to investigate interdependence in groups in the laboratory when specific parameters are placed on debate outcomes. Participants are instructed to engage in debate with one another over various topics (i.e., business, abortion, and race) and placed under one of two decision rules as instructed: consensus or majority rule. The degree to which participants remain “engaged” in the debate is of particular interest in this study. Prior to the test trial each participant completes a pre-discussion questionnaire designed to ascertain personal beliefs regarding each of the topics discussed. Participants complete a similar questionnaire immediately following the test trials. In addition, galvanic skin responses (GSR) and utterance counts over time are being obtained from randomly selected participants as a measure of autonomic arousal. We plan to analyze with time series. We expect that time-series data from groups, teams and organizations can augment self-reported data collected from individuals. Preliminary findings will be reviewed.

Offline: Is democracy good for your health?

Two widely accepted — but nevertheless quite erroneous — theoretical notions appear to dominate contemporary scholarly thinking and writing about the politics, in culturally, ethnically, and racially divided societies: the equation of democracy with majority rule, and the proposition that democracy is not a viable form of government for such deeply divided societies. These ideas are both so basic and so prevalent in political science that they may be compared to ‘paradigms’ in Thomas S. Kuhn’s sense of the term.1 KeywordsMajority RuleGrand CoalitionPlural SocietyPeaceful CoexistencePeace ResearchThese 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.

Reviewed by: The Last Defenders of the Laager: Ian D. Smith and F.W. De Klerk Surendra Bhana Mungazi, Dickson A. 1998. The Last Defenders of the Laager: Ian D. Smith and F.W. De Klerk. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. 266 pp. $65.00 (cloth). This book sets out to compare the "laagers" created by white rulers in colonial Zimbabwe and the pre-1994 South Africa primarily through educational systems tailored to create subservience among the African majorities. Operating in a racially closed and undemocratic system, these white-ruled enclaves failed to ensure the full development of the human potential of their African subjects. The author brings special knowledge of colonial Zimbabwe education. It was the subject of his 1977 doctoral thesis as well as two books in 1982 and 1990. In colonial Zimbabwe, various administrators debated about the kind of education to plan for their African subjects without endangering the "laager," that is, white privilege and domination. There were those who [End Page 151] sought to promote education that prized "human relationship based on equal opportunity" (p. 64); the chief one was Harold Jowitt. Even so, the disparities were significant--40 cents spent on an African pupil as opposed to $20 on a white pupil. Conservative whites, however, were determined to maintain domination at the expense of African education; Godfrey Huggins (1933 to 1953) and Ian D. Smith (1964 to 1979) were the strongest advocates of this position. Smith was the"ultimate defender" of the "laager" because he vowed that there would be no majority rule in his time, "not in a thousand years." He combined education with land policy to achieve his aim, and sparked off a rebellion in the schools that undermined the stability of his regime. In South Africa, segregated and unequal education was in place long before the apartheid regime introduced the Bantu Education Act of 1953 whose aim was to give Africans a watered down education more suited for their politically subservient position. As in colonial Zimbabwe, there was a huge gap in the allocation of educational resources. The apartheid state sought to tighten its control by insisting on Afrikaans as the medium of instruction and thereby sparked off the Soweto uprisings of 1976, whose impact the author hyperbolically compares to the "destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (p. 43). The student action was to unleash forces of destabilization which, together with other factors, was to see the eventual fall of apartheid. The author is on familiar grounds in dealing with political developments in Zimbabwe insofar as they concerned education policies, but he might have strengthened his presentation by undertaking a more thoroughgoing analysis of the educational system. Political policy-making aside, how did the system work on the ground for Africans and whites? What was the curricular content and makeup of education in white and African schools? While such analysis was necessary to explain the situation in Zimbabwe, it was imperative to see relevant details about educational policies in South Africa. The state in South Africa not only provided inferior education for Africans, it shifted some of the resources to make schools in the newly created Homelands viable. There is no discussion of this in the book. When the Soweto uprising occurred in 1976, it recognized its error in neglecting to provide for the expansion of African education in urban black areas. It belatedly attempted to make amends by diverting some of the resources after 1976, but by then the situation had become highly politicized. African students were not interested in apartheid education as is apparent in the slogan they used, "Liberation before education!" The South African part especially lacks the depth of details to support the book's argument. The comparison would have been effective only if the author had drawn upon the vast body of literature that is available on South Africa. There is far too much reliance on foreign newspapers and magazines or some incidental material supplied by the South African Consulate in Los Angeles (it is not an Embassy, as the author says). Educational [End Page 152] developments needed to be properly located within the context of the roles played by the mass democratic movement, labor unions, guerrilla activities, and international...