Welfarism and the Assessments of Social Decision Rules
In Ulle Endriss (ed.), Computational Social Choice 2006 (2006)
| Abstract | The choice of a social decision rule for a federal assembly affects the welfare distribution within the federation. But which decision rules can be recommended on welfarist grounds? In this paper, we focus on two welfarist desiderata, viz. (i) maximizing the expected utility of the whole federation and (ii) equalizing the expected utilities of people from dif- ferent states in the federation. We consider the European Union as an example, set up a probabilistic model of decision making and explore how different decision rules fare with regard to the desiderata. We start with a default model, where the interests, and therefore the votes of the different states are not correlated. This default model is then abandoned in favor of models with correlations. We perform computer simulations and find that decision rules with a low acceptance threshold do generally better in terms of desideratum (i), whereas the rules presented in the Accession Treaty and in the (still unratified) Constitution of the Euro- pean Union tend to do better in terms of desideratum (ii). The ranking obtained regarding desideratum (i) is fairly stable across different corre- lation patterns. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMartin Peterson & Sven Ove Hansson (2005). Order-Independent Transformative Decision Rules. Synthese 147 (2):323-342.
Martin Peterson (2003). Transformative Decision Rules. Erkenntnis 58 (1):71-85.
Luba Sapir (1998). The Optimality of the Expert and Majority Rules Under Exponentially Distributed Competence. Theory and Decision 45 (1):19-36.
Jacob Paroush (1997). Order Relations Among Efficient Decision Rules. Theory and Decision 43 (3):209-218.
Claus Beisbart, Luc Bovens & Stephan Hartmann (2005). A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules in the Council of Ministers. European Union Politics 6 (4):395-419.
Stephan Hartmann, Claus Beisbart & Luc Bovens (2005). A Utilitarian Assessment of Alternative Decision Rules in the Council of Ministers. European Union Politics 6 (4):395-419.
Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann (2010). Welfarist Evaluations of Decision Rules Under Interstate Utility Dependencies. Social Choice and Welfare 34 (2):315-344.
Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann (2006). Welfarism and the Assessment of Social Decision Rules. In Jerome Lang & Ulle Endriss (eds.), Computational Social Choice 2006. University of Amsterdam.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2010-07-26Total downloads0Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
