General representation of epistemically optimal procedures
| Abstract | Assuming that votes are independent, the epistemically optimal procedure in a binary collective choice problem is known to be a weighted supermajority rule with weights given by personal log-likelihood-ratios. It is shown here that an analogous result holds in a much more general model. Firstly, the result follows from a more basic principle than expected-utility maximisation, namely from an axiom ("Epistemic Monotonicity") which requires neither utilities nor prior probabilities of the ‘correctness’ of alternatives. Secondly, a person’s input need not be a vote for an alternative, it may be any type of input, for instance a subjective degree of belief or probability of the correctness of one of the alternatives. The case of a profile of subjective degrees of belief is particularly appealing, since here no parameters such as competence parameters need to be known. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,672 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesMiquel Bastons (2008). The Role of Virtues in the Framing of Decisions. Journal of Business Ethics 78 (3):389 - 400.
Stephen A. Clark (2000). Revealed Preference and Expected Utility. Theory and Decision 49 (2):159-174.
Franz Huber (2005). Subjective Probabilities as Basis for Scientific Reasoning? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (1):101-116.
Mehmet Bac & Parimal Kanti Bag (2002). Committee Decisions with Partisans and Side-Transfers. Theory and Decision 52 (3):267-286.
Ronald N. Giere (1969). Bayesian Statistics and Biased Procedures. Synthese 20 (3):371 - 387.
Luba Sapir (1998). The Optimality of the Expert and Majority Rules Under Exponentially Distributed Competence. Theory and Decision 45 (1):19-36.
Fany Yuval (2002). Sophisticated Voting Under the Sequential Voting by Veto. Theory and Decision 53 (4):343-369.
Hilary Greaves & David Wallace (2006). Justifying Conditionalization: Conditionalization Maximizes Expected Epistemic Utility. Mind 115 (459):607-632.
Paul D. Thistle (1998). Social Structure, Economic Performance and Pareto Optimality. Theory and Decision 45 (2):161-173.
Lyle Zynda (2000). Representation Theorems and Realism About Degrees of Belief. Philosophy of Science 67 (1):45-69.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads2 ( #232,381 of 549,067 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,067 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
