The concept of preference structuration not only provides possible escape-routes for social-choice-theoretic impossibility problems, but also points towards ways of formalizing notions of pluralism, consensus and issue-dimensionality. The present note introduces two methods of (operationally)...

In the classical Condorcet jury model, different jurors votes are independent random variables, where each juror has the same probability p1/2 of voting for the correct alternative. The probability that the correct alternative will win under majority voting converges to 1 as the number of jurors...

At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination as opposed to freedom as non-interference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a...

The widely discussed `discursive dilemma' shows that majority voting in a group of individuals on logically connected propositions may produce irrational collective judgments. We generalize majority voting by considering quota rules, which accept each proposition if and only if the number of...

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in...

A framing effect occurs when an agent’s choices are not invariant under changes in the way a decision problem is presented, e.g. changes in the way options are described (violation of description invariance) or preferences are elicited (violation of procedure invariance). Here we identify...

Under the independence and competence assumptions of Condorcet’s classical jury model, the probability of a correct majority decision converges to certainty as the jury size increases, a seemingly unrealistic result. Using Bayesian networks, we argue that the model’s independence assumption...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Preferences are usually assumed to be fixed and exogenously given. Building on related work on reasons and rational choice (Dietrich and List,...

In the theory of judgment aggregation, it is known for which agendas of propositions it is possible to aggregate individual judgments into collective ones in accordance with the Arrow-inspired requirements of universal domain, collective rationality, unanimity preservation, non-dictatorship and...