Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: general agendas

Franz Dietrich and Christian List ()
Additional contact information
Christian List: London School of Economics

Social Choice and Welfare, 2017, vol. 48, issue 4, No 4, 747-786

Abstract: Abstract How can several individuals’ probability assignments to some events be aggregated into a collective probability assignment? Classic results on this problem assume that the set of relevant events—the agenda—is a $$\sigma $$ σ -algebra and is thus closed under disjunction (union) and conjunction (intersection). We drop this demanding assumption and explore probabilistic opinion pooling on general agendas. One might be interested in the probability of rain and that of an interest-rate increase, but not in the probability of rain or an interest-rate increase. We characterize linear pooling and neutral pooling for general agendas, with classic results as special cases for agendas that are $$\sigma $$ σ -algebras. As an illustrative application, we also consider probabilistic preference aggregation. Finally, we unify our results with existing results on binary judgment aggregation and Arrovian preference aggregation. We show that the same kinds of axioms (independence and consensus preservation) have radically different implications for different aggregation problems: linearity for probability aggregation and dictatorship for binary judgment or preference aggregation.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-017-1034-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: general agendas (2017)
Working Paper: Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: General agendas (2017)
Working Paper: Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: General agendas (2017)
Working Paper: Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized. Part one: General agendas (2017)
Working Paper: Probabilistic opinion pooling generalized Part one: General agendas (2014)
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:spr:sochwe:v:48:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s00355-017-1034-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-017-1034-z

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().