Speaker: Patrick Girard
Affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland
Title: Reasoning about social preferences
Date: Thursday, 1 Apr 2010
Time: 3:00 pm
Location: Room 401

A systematic way of aggregating individual preferences is to impose a hierarchy over groups of agents. I proceed in two steps, first by aggregating individual desires constrained by given hierarchies and second by defining preferences based on group desires. All this can be performed precisely in a hybrid modal logic (a basic modal logic augmented with names for states). This procedure avoids (some of) the consequences of Arrow’s impossibility theorem in social choice theory while retaining desirable aggregation properties, but the price to pay is the prioritization of agents. In this talk, I present the basic logic of preference aggregation and discuss the logical approach to the problem of preference aggregation.