Social Choice, Merging, and Elections

Abstract. Intelligent agents have to be able to merge inputs received from different sources in a coherent and rational way. Recently, several proposals have been made for the merging of structures in which it is possible to encode the preferences of sources [5, 4, 12–14, 1]. Information merging has much in common with the goals of social choice theory: to define operations reflecting the preferences of a society from the individual preferences of the members of the society. Given this connection it seems reasonable to require that any framework for the merging of information has to provide satisfactory ways of dealing with the problems raised in social choice theory. In this paper we investigate the link between the merging of epistemic states and two important results in social choice theory. We show that Arrow’s well-known impossibility theorem [2] can be circumvented when the preferences of sources are represented in terms of epistemic states. This is achieved by providing a ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ECSQARU
• Authors: Thomas Andreas Meyer, Aditya Ghose, Samir Chopra
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, ECSQARU 2001, Epistemic States, Preferences, Social Choice Theory