Social Contract, Extended Goodness, and Moral Disagreement

This article discusses the role played by interpersonal comparisons (of utility or goodness) in matters of justice and equity. The role of such interpersonal comparisons has initially been made explicit in the context of social choice theory through the concept of extended preferences. Social choice theorists have generally claimed that extended preferences should be taken as being uniform across a population. Three related claims are made within this perspective. First, though it is sometimes opposed to social choice theory, the social contract approach may also consider the possibility of interpersonal comparisons. This is due to the fact that justice principles may be partially justified on a teleological basis. Second, searching for the uniformity of interpersonal comparisons is both hopeless and useless. In particular, moral disagreement does not originate in the absence of such uniformity. Third, interpersonal comparisons should be accounted for both in social choice and social contract theories in terms of sympathetic identification based on reciprocal respect and tolerance, where each person’s conception of the good partially takes care of others’ good. From the moral point of view, any person’s conception of the good should thus be ‘extended’ to others’ personal conceptions. This extension is, however, limited due to the inherent limitations in sympathetic identification and is a long way from guaranteeing the uniformity assumed by social choice theorists.

Determination of Break-Even Point through Consumer Preference Relation

Social choice theory beliefs about how the consumers function to chose their interested goods and services. Preference relation with affine indifference curves that has a concave representation has a linear utility representation. This study asks how individual preference relations might be combined to give a single ordering which captures the overall wishes of the group of individuals. There are certain properties that one would like such a utility rule, utility have thus become a more abstract concept that is not necessarily solely based on the satisfaction or pleasure received. Concept of cardinal utility is studied in three different situations Debreu (1958) gave quite different approach. This study maintains link between mathematical theory and financial concept to determine break-even point through the consumers’ preference relation.

Diversity in Kemeny Rank Aggregation: A Parameterized Approach

In its most traditional setting, the main concern of optimization theory is the search for optimal solutions for instances of a given computational problem. A recent trend of research in artificial intelligence, called solution diversity, has focused on the development of notions of optimality that may be more appropriate in settings where subjectivity is essential. The idea is that instead of aiming at the development of algorithms that output a single optimal solution, the goal is to investigate algorithms that output a small set of sufficiently good solutions that are sufficiently diverse from one another. In this way, the user has the opportunity to choose the solution that is most appropriate to the context at hand. It also displays the richness of the solution space. When combined with techniques from parameterized complexity theory, the paradigm of diversity of solutions offers a powerful algorithmic framework to address problems of practical relevance. In this work, we investigate the impact of this combination in the field of Kemeny Rank Aggregation, a well-studied class of problems lying in the intersection of order theory and social choice theory and also in the field of order theory itself. In particular, we show that KRA is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to natural parameters providing natural formalizations of the notions of diversity and of the notion of a sufficiently good solution. Our main results work both when considering the traditional setting of aggregation over linearly ordered votes, and in the more general setting where votes are partially ordered.

Shortlisting Rules and Incentives in an End-to-End Model for Participatory Budgeting

We introduce an end-to-end model for participatory budgeting grounded in social choice theory. Our model accounts for the interplay between the two stages commonly encountered in real-life partici- patory budgeting. In the first stage participants pro- pose projects to be shortlisted, while in the second stage they vote on which of the shortlisted projects should be funded. Prior work of a formal nature has focused on analysing the second stage only. We in- troduce several shortlisting rules for the first stage and analyse them in both normative and algorith- mic terms. Our main focus is on the incentives of participants to engage in strategic behaviour during the first stage, in which they need to reason about how their proposals will impact the range of strate- gies available to everyone in the second stage.

Reducing the Computational Time for the Kemeny Method by Exploiting Condorcet Properties

Preference aggregation and in particular ranking aggregation are mainly studied by the field of social choice theory but extensively applied in a variety of contexts. Among the most prominent methods for ranking aggregation, the Kemeny method has been proved to be the only one that satisfies some desirable properties such as neutrality, consistency and the Condorcet condition at the same time. Unfortunately, the problem of finding a Kemeny ranking is NP-hard, which prevents practitioners from using it in real-life problems. The state of the art of exact algorithms for the computation of the Kemeny ranking experienced a major boost last year with the presentation of an algorithm that provides searching time guarantee up to 13 alternatives. In this work, we propose an enhanced version of this algorithm based on pruning the search space when some Condorcet properties hold. This enhanced version greatly improves the performance in terms of runtime consumption.

Epilogue

Two major branches of social and engineering sciences—social choice theory and systems analysis—seldom come together. Social choice theory guides the methods we use to choose among a given slate of alternatives. Systems analysis helps us think of new choices. Our efforts in this book are to show how the two areas of thought can be combined fruitfully to enhance organizational decision-making. Systems perspectives encourage thinking about how things interconnect. Deliberation processes that allow nonlinear thinking encourage systemwide thinking. Multi-criteria decision methods tell us how to evaluate choices with multiple dimensions of value. New methods of social choice give people methods to vote on all the choices together, holistically. Combining all of these will lead to a system that produces better design, decisions, and democracy.

Social choice problems with public reason proceduralism

Most political liberals argue that only rules, policies and institutions that are part of society’s basic structure need to be justified with so-called public reasons. Laws enacted outside this set are legitimate if and when public reasons can justify the procedure that selects them. I argue that this view is susceptible to known problems from social choice theory. However, there are resources within political liberalism that could address them. If the scope of public reason is extended beyond the basic structure it could order people’s preferences in a way that circumvents the identified issues.

Prosociality in Majority Decisions: A Laboratory Experiment on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set

Social choice theory demonstrates that majority rule is generically indeterminate. However, from an empirical perspective, large and arbitrary policy shifts are rare events in politics. The uncovered set (UCS) is the dominant preference-based explanation for the apparent empirical predictability of majority rule in multiple dimensions. Its underlying logic assumes that voters act strategically, considering the ultimate consequences of their actions. I argue that all empirical applications of the UCS rest on an incomplete behavioral model assuming purely egoistically motivated individuals. Beyond material self-interest, prosocial motivations offer an additional factor to explain the outcomes of majority rule. I test my claim in a series of committee decision-making experiments in which I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location of the UCS constant. The experimental results overwhelmingly support the prosociality explanation.