Respect for experts or respect for unanimity? The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling

Frederik Herzberg

No 513, Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers from Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University

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 or liberal rights. Dietrich and List (2008) have generalised this result to the setting of binary judgement aggregation. This paper proves that the liberal paradox holds even in the framework of probabilistic opinion pooling and discusses options to circumvent this impossibility result: restricting the aggregator domain to profiles with no potential for conflicting rights, or considering agendas whose issues are not all mutually interdependent.

Keywords: probabilistic opinion pooling; Sen’s liberal paradox; expert rights; liberal rights; unanimity; general aggregation theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6
Date: 2016-03-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/download/2901599/2901600 First Version, 2014 (application/x-download)

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Journal Article: Respect for experts vs. respect for unanimity: The liberal paradox in probabilistic opinion pooling (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bie:wpaper:513

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