Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In this paper we explore the relation between three areas: judgment aggregation, belief merging and social choice theory. Judgment aggregation studies how to aggregate individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may however give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the conclusion). Starting from this so-called doctrinal paradox, the paper surveys the literature on judgment aggregation (and its relation to preference aggregation), and shows that the application of a well known belief merging operator can dissolve the paradox. Finally, the use of distances is shown to establish a link between belief merging and preference aggregation in social choice theory.
@InProceedings{eckert_et_al:DagSemProc.05321.8,
author = {Eckert, Daniel and Pigozzi, Gabriella},
title = {{Belief merging, judgment aggregation and some links with social choice theory}},
booktitle = {Belief Change in Rational Agents: Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and Economics},
pages = {1--14},
series = {Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)},
ISSN = {1862-4405},
year = {2005},
volume = {5321},
editor = {James Delgrande and Jerome Lang and Hans Rott and Jean-Marc Tallon},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.05321.8},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-3330},
doi = {10.4230/DagSemProc.05321.8},
annote = {Keywords: Judgment aggregation, belief merging, preference aggregation, social choice theory}
}