IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bie/wpaper/513.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Respect for experts or respect for unanimity? The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling

Author

Listed:
  • Herzberg, Frederik

    (Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University)

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 or liberal rights. Dietrich and List (2008) have generalised this result to the setting of binary judgement aggregation. This paper proves that the liberal paradox holds even in the framework of probabilistic opinion pooling and discusses options to circumvent this impossibility result: restricting the aggregator domain to profiles with no potential for conflicting rights, or considering agendas whose issues are not all mutually interdependent.

Suggested Citation

  • Herzberg, Frederik, 2016. "Respect for experts or respect for unanimity? The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 513, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    • Handle: RePEc:bie:wpaper:513
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/download/2901599/2901600
    File Function: First Version, 2014
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Philippe Mongin, 2012. "The doctrinal paradox, the discursive dilemma, and logical aggregation theory," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 73(3), pages 315-355, September.
    2. Sen, Amartya Kumar, 1970. "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," Scholarly Articles 3612779, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    3. Sen, Amartya, 1970. "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 78(1), pages 152-157, Jan.-Feb..
    4. Franz Dietrich & Christian List, 2008. "A liberal paradox for judgment aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 31(1), pages 59-78, June.
    5. Anand, Paul & Pattanaik, Prasanta & Puppe, Clemens (ed.), 2009. "The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199290420, Decembrie.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kretz, Claudio, 2021. "Consistent rights on property spaces," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Itai Sher, 2020. "How perspective-based aggregation undermines the Pareto principle," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, , vol. 19(2), pages 182-205, May.
    2. Nan Li, 2018. "A paradox of expert rights in abstract argumentation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(4), pages 737-752, December.
    3. Piggins, Ashley & Salerno, Gillian, 2016. "Sen cycles and externalities," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 25-27.
    4. Richard Bradley, 2007. "Reaching a consensus," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 29(4), pages 609-632, December.
    5. Kretz, Claudio, 2021. "Consistent rights on property spaces," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    6. List, Christian, 2010. "The theory of judgment aggregation: an introductory review," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 27596, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. Klaus Nehring, 2005. "The (Im)Possibility of a Paretian Rational," Economics Working Papers 0068, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science.
    8. Colander, David, 2009. "What Was “It” That Robbins Was Defining?," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, vol. 31(4), pages 437-448, December.
    9. Wiebke Kuklys & Ingrid Robeyns, 2004. "Sens's Capability Approach to Welfare Economics," Papers on Strategic Interaction 2004-03, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group.
    10. Antoinette Baujard, 2016. "Utilitarianism and anti-utilitarianism," Chapters, in: Gilbert Faccarello & Heinz D. Kurz (ed.), Handbook on the History of Economic Analysis Volume III, chapter 40, pages 576-588, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    11. Herrade Igersheim, 2006. "Libéralisme de la liberté versus libéralisme du bonheur. Le cas du paradoxe libéral-parétien," Revue économique, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 57(3), pages 389-398.
    12. Leo Katz & Alvaro Sandroni, 2020. "Limits on power and rationality," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 54(2), pages 507-521, March.
    13. Andreas P. Kyriacou, 2005. "Rationality, Ethnicity And Institutions: A Survey Of Issues And Results," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(1), pages 23-42, February.
    14. Michael Munger, 2006. "A Life Reexamined," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 128(3), pages 499-500, September.
    15. List, Christian & Polak, Ben, 2010. "Introduction to judgment aggregation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(2), pages 441-466, March.
    16. Christian Roessler & Sandro Shelegia & Bruno Strulovici, 2018. "Collective Commitment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(1), pages 347-380.
    17. Youngsheng Xu & Naoki Yoshihara, 2019. "Efficiency invites Divide and Coercion in the Age of Increasing Returns to Scale," Working Papers SDES-2019-12, Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management, revised Nov 2019.
    18. Wesley H. Holliday & Eric Pacuit, 2020. "Arrow’s decisive coalitions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 54(2), pages 463-505, March.
    19. Gennady Bilych, 2014. "The Theory of Justice and Profit Maximization," Business and Economic Research, Macrothink Institute, vol. 4(1), pages 188-210, June.
    20. Bernholz, Peter, 1997. "Property rights, contracts, cyclical social preferences and the Coase theorem: A synthesis," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 419-442, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    probabilistic opinion pooling; Sen’s liberal paradox; expert rights; liberal rights; unanimity; general aggregation theory;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • C11 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Bayesian Analysis: General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bie:wpaper:513. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bettina Weingarten (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imbiede.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.