A liberal paradox for judgment aggregation

Franz Dietrich and Christian List

Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the emerging literature on judgment (as opposed to preference) aggregation, expert rights or liberal rights have not been investigated yet. When a group forms collective beliefs, it may assign experts with special knowledge on certain propositions the right to determine the collective judgment on those propositions; and, when a group forms collective goals or desires, it may assign individuals specially affected by certain propositions similar rights on those propositions. We identify a problem similar to, but more general than, Sen's `liberal paradox': Under plausible conditions, the assignment of such rights to two or more individuals (or subgroups) is inconsistent with the unanimity principle, whereby propositions accepted by all individuals must be collectively accepted. So a group respecting expert or liberal rights on certain propositions must sometimes overrule its unanimous judgments on others. The inconsistency does not arise if either different individuals' rights are `disconnected' or individuals are `agnostic/tolerant' or `deferring/empathetic' towards other individuals' rights. Our findings have implications for the design of mechanisms by which groups (societies, committees, expert panels, organizations) can reach decisions on systems of interconnected propositions.

Keywords: liberal paradox; liberal right; expert right; subgroup rights; unanimity principle; judgment aggregation; empathy; deferral; tolerance; agnosticism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2004-05-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-reg
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 20
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: A liberal paradox for judgment aggregation (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwppe:0405003

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