Group deliberation and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result

Christian List

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility result: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible condition is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility result and argue that successful group deliberation must be ‘holistic’: individuals cannot generally revise their judgments on a proposition based on judgments on that proposition alone but must take other propositions into account too. I discuss the significance of these findings for democratic theory.

Keywords: group deliberation; judgment aggregation; judgment transformation; belief revision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2007-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19273/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Group deliberation and the transformation ofjudgments: an impossibility result (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:19273

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