Social discount rate: spaces for agreement

We study the problem of aggregating discounted utility preferences into a social discounted utility preference model. We use an axiom capturing a social responsibility of individuals’ attitudes to time, called consensus Pareto. We show that this axiom can provide consistent foundations for welfare judgments. Moreover, in conjunction with the standard axioms of anonymity and continuity, consensus Pareto can help adjudicate some fundamental issues related to the choice of the social discount rate: the society selects the rate through a generalized median voter scheme.

APPLICATION OF INTEGRATED RATING MECHANISMS AND MATRIX NON-ANONYMOUS GENERALIZED MEDIAN VOTER SCHEMES TO COORDINATION OF THE AGENTS’ INTERESTS

The collective agent coordination problem in organizational behavior systems is consider. In particular, the problem of coordinating of the agents’ interests to assess the degree of achieve-ment of the corporate strategic targets. The relevance of the problem is due to the need to increase the speed of decision-making, the speed of reaction to changes in the external environment, which can be achieved using appropriate control mechanisms. Aim. Improving methods of collective deci-sion making under circumstances where agents have different ranks of significance. Materials and methods. Methods comprise the integrated rating mechanisms and the generalized median voter schemes. The mathematical apparatus was chosen is contingent on the group decision making in organizational systems. Active agents strives to maximize his target function in the process of inter-action, which leads to a conflict of interests and a desire to distort information. The chosen methods allow these problems to be solved. The first ones are used to aggregate indicators that reflect the de-gree of achievement of the private goals of the organization at the strategic level. The second ones are used to identification the true agents’ opinions about the type of target index convolution matri-ces. Results. The matrix non-anonymous generalized median mechanism is proposed. The non-anonymous statement allows taking into account the interests of agents with different ranks. It is shown how to reduce non-anonymous procedure to an anonymous one. Decisions making process about all elements of the convolution matrices in integrated rating mechanisms with using anony-mous median voter scheme is strategy proofnees. However, the results of aggregation are not stabil-ity to the agent strategic behavior in cases of application anonymous or non-anonymous coordina-tion procedures. The new integrated mechanism based on the synthesis of known control mecha-nisms is proposed to overcome the discovered problem. Conclusion. The statement of the problem corresponds to the real procedures of decision making by governance board, when the opinion of one agent turns out to be more significant than the opinion of another agent. The developed mech-anism makes it possible to agree on the opinions of experts on the degree of achievement of the strategic goals of the organization; it can also be adapted to solve other applied problems, for ex-ample, making a decision on the choice of a project, assessing risks, assessing suppliers, etc.

On strategy-proofness and single-peakedness: median-voting over intervals

We study correspondences that choose an interval of alternatives when agents have single-peaked preferences over locations and ordinally extend their preferences over intervals. We extend the main results of Moulin (Public Choice 35:437–455, 1980) to our setting and show that the results of Ching (Soc Choice Welf 26:473–490, 1997) cannot always be similarly extended. First, strategy-proofness and peaks-onliness characterize the class of generalized median correspondences (Theorem 1). Second, this result neither holds on the domain of symmetric and single-peaked preferences, nor can in this result min/max continuity substitute peaks-onliness (see counter-Example 3). Third, strategy-proofness and voter-sovereignty characterize the class of efficient generalized median correspondences (Theorem 2).