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

TOHMÉ, FERNANDO; AUDAY, MARCELO

Universidad de La Plata

Congreso; Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Economía Política; 2005

AAEP

The usual procedure in Social Choice Theory consists in postulating some desirable properties which a aggregation procedure should verify and from them to derive the features of the corresponding social choice function and the outcomes that arise at each possible profile of preferences. In this paper we invert this line of reasoning and try to infer, up from what we call social situations (each one consisting of a profile and the associated social ordering) the criteria verified in the implicit aggregation procedure. Furthermore, we derive them in axiomatic form. This inference process, which extracts intentional from extensional information, can be seen as an exercise in social choice theoretic "statistics". The fact that complete intentional characterizations of the aggregation process cannot be derived in such way can be easily seen as a consequence of the procedure. Even so, this method can be seen as a fundamental component for the implementation of desired social preferences, if only a description of the individual preferences of the agents of a given society are known.