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Optimal Social Choice Functions: a Utilitarian View by Craig Boutilier; Ioannis Caragiannis; Simi Haber; Tyler Lu; Ariel D. Procaccia; Or Sheffet is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Optimal Social Choice Functions: a Utilitarian View about?

We adopt a utilitarian perspective on social choice, assuming that agents have (possibly latent) utility functions over some space of alternatives. For many reasons one might consider mechanisms, or social choice functions, that only have access to the ordinal rankings of alternatives by the individual agents rather than their utility functions. In this context, one possible objective for a social choice function is the maximization of (expected) social welfare relative to the information contained in these rankings. We study such optimal social choice functions under three different models, and underscore the important role played by scoring functions. In our worst-case model, no assumptions are made about the underlying distribution and we analyze the worst-case distortion-or degree to which the selected alternative does not maximize social welfare-of optimal social choice functions. In our average-case model, we derive optimal functions under neutral (or impartial culture) distributional models. Finally, a very general learning-theoretic model allows for the computation of optimal social choice functions (i.e., that maximize expected social welfare) under arbitrary, sampleable d

Author

Craig Boutilier; Ioannis Caragiannis; Simi Haber; Tyler Lu; Ariel D. Procaccia; Or Sheffet

Publisher

ACM

Published

2012

Language

EN