Abstract
Many collective decisions depend upon questions about objective facts or probabilities. Several theories in social choice and political philosophy suggest that democratic institutions can obtain accurate answers to such questions. But these theories are founded on assumptions and modelling paradigms that are both implausible and incompatible with one another. I will propose a roadmap for a more realistic and unified approach to this problem.
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Notes
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Melioristic and optimality results are sometimes lumped together and called nonasymptotic ESC results.
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See Pivato (2017) for a more detailed summary of this literature.
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See Lorenz (2007) for an introduction and literature review of computer modelling of social opinion dynamics.
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- 9.
See Mongin and Pivato (2017) for an elaboration of this argument. To be clear, we are here talking about the ex ante Pareto axiom (which concerns preferences over social lotteries before the resolution of uncertainty), rather than the ex post Pareto axiom (which concerns preferences over social outcomes after the resolution of uncertainty).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Gabriel Carroll, Franz Dietrich, Umberto Grandi, Justin Leroux, Christian List, Arianna Novaro, Kai Spiekermann, and Bill Zwicker for their very helpful comments. None of them are responsible for any errors.
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Pivato, M. (2019). Realizing Epistemic Democracy. In: Laslier, JF., Moulin, H., Sanver, M., Zwicker, W. (eds) The Future of Economic Design. Studies in Economic Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18050-8_16
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