Social Choice Situations and Aggregation Criteria: Inductive Reasoning in Social Choice Theory

FEDERICO FIORAVANTI

San Luis

Congreso; Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Teoría Económica; 2015

The usual procedure in Social Choice Theory consists in postulating some desirable properties which an aggregation procedure should verify and derive from them the features of the corresponding socialchoice function and the outcomes that arise at each possible profile ofpreferences. In this paper we invert this line of reasoning and try toinfer, up from what we call social situations (each one consisting of aprofile and the associated social ordering) the criteria verified in theimplicit aggregation procedure. This inference process, which extractsintensional from extensional information can be seen as an exercisein social choice-theoretic ?statistics?. Although complete intensionalcharacterizations of the aggregation process cannot be derived, thismethod can be seen as a fundamental component for the implementation of desired social preferences, if only a description of the individualpreferences of the agents in a given society are known.