Sen's Paradox with Intensions-Based Preferences and Loss Aversion:
Theory and Experimental Application
School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas
Thursday, September 25th, 4 pm
402 Claudia Cohen Hall
Sen’s liberal paradox showed that collective choices cannot simultaneously satisfy both Paretian and liberal ethics when individuals have ‘nosy’ preferences. A large literature has sought to understand how the paradox might be resolved from an axiomatic perspective without much success. Diverging from previous research, the present analysis uses behavioral game theory to study this problem. First, it shows how the paradox can be recast as an extended game in which individuals (i) value contractions in their set of strategies more than equivalent gains in strategies (goal-based loss aversion), and (ii) have preferences over the strategies employed by their opponents (intensions-based preferences). Second, it presents a natural interpretation of paradox resolution in this context: namely, the situation where individuals achieve Pareto efficient outcomes by agreeing to restrict or expand the strategy sets from which they can choose. Third, it shows how these resolutions jointly depend on individuals’ nosiness and loss-aversion. Model results suggest that ‘pragmatic’ resolutions of Sen’s paradox can exist, a conjecture that lends itself to experimental investigation. Therefore three experimental designs that reflect the intuition of the model are discussed. The objective of the research agenda is to employ behavioral game theory and experimental economics to revisit axiomatic social choice theory as it existed prior to the development of mechanism design to resolve social choice issues.
Consensus, Compromise and Judgment Aggregation
Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science
Thursday, October 2nd, 4 pm
402 Claudia Cohen Hall
Judgment aggregation studies the aggregation of yes-no judgments of the members of a jury on logically interconnected propositions into a consistent collective judgment set. As the discursive dilemma shows, proposition-wise majority voting will not in general lead to a consistent collective judgment set. To arrive at a consistent collective judgment set, three procedures have been discussed in the literature: the premise-based procedure (PBP), the conclusion-based procedure (CBP) and the distance-based procedure (DBP). According to these procedures, the jury can accept a judgment set that only a few (or even none) of the members of the jury voted for. This raises the question whether such a decision is really acceptable. Clearly, a decision based on PBP, CBP or DBP amounts to a compromise, and not everybody will be happy with the decision. The jury members agree to go along with the will of the others. The preferred solution, however, is to arrive at a consensus, whereby every jury member is in agreement with the final decision. The goal of this paper is to develop a model for the emergence of consensus in a judgment aggregation setting and to asks how this new aggregation method compares with suitably generalized versions of PBP, CBP and DBP. The paper is based on joint work with Jan Sprenger (Tilburg).
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, will speak on Thursday, March 19, 2009.
Shaun Nichols, Professor of Philosophy at The University of Arizona, will speak on Thursday, April 2, 2009.