Joint desirability foundations of social choice and opinion pooling

Abstract

AbstractWe develop joint foundations for the fields of social choice and opinion pooling using coherent sets of desirable gambles, a general uncertainty model that allows to encompass both complete and incomplete preferences. This leads on the one hand to a new perspective of traditional results of social choice (in particular Arrow’s theorem as well as sufficient conditions for the existence of an oligarchy and democracy) and on the other hand to using the same framework to analyse opinion pooling. In particular, we argue that weak Pareto (unanimity) should be given the status of a rationality requirement and use this to discuss the aggregation of experts’ opinions based on probability and (state-independent) utility, showing some inherent limitation of this framework, with implications for statistics. The connection between our results and earlier work in the literature is also discussed.