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

Frederik Herzberg

Economics Letters, 2017, vol. 151, issue C, 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).

Keywords: Probabilistic opinion pooling; Sen’s liberal paradox; Expert rights; Liberal rights; Unanimity; General aggregation theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 D71 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176516305110
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Respect for experts or respect for unanimity? The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:151:y:2017:i:c:p:44-47

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2016.12.012

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().