Respect for experts vs. respect for unanimity: The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling

Herzberg, Frederik (2017): Respect for experts vs. respect for unanimity: The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling. In: Economics Letters, Vol. 151: pp. 44-47

Abstract

Amartya Sen (1970) has shown that three natural desiderata for social choice rules are inconsistent: universal domain, respect for unanimity, and respect for some minimal rights which can be interpreted as either "expert rights" (an expert's right to have her competence respected) or liberal rights. Dietrich and List (2008) have generalised this result to the setting of binary judgement aggregation. This paper proves that the paradox of a Paretian liberal holds even in the framework of probabilistic opinion pooling and discusses options to circumvent this impossibility result: (i) restricting the aggregator domain to profiles with no potential for conflicting rights;(ii) avoiding agendas where all issues are pairwise entangled (interdependent). (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science > Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP)
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 100 Philosophy; 500 Science > 510 Mathematics
• ISSN: 0165-1765
• Language: English