The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering, and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner. We propose to treat ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e., as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals into an adequate collective de...

The aggregation of conflicting preferences is an important issue in human society and multiagent systems. Due to its universality, voting among a set of alternatives has a central role among preference aggregation mechanisms. We consider the most general case of voting in which the voters’ rankings of alternatives are mapped to a collective ranking of alternatives by a so-called social welfare ...

We introduce a logic specifically designed to support reasoning about social choice functions. The logic includes operators to capture strategic ability, and operators to capture agent preferences. We establish a correspondence between formulae in the logic and properties of social choice functions, and show that the logic is expressively complete with respect to social choice functions, i.e., ...

Social choice theory is the field of scientific inquiry that studies the aggregation of individual preferences towards a collective choice. For example, social choice theorists—who hail from a range of different disciplines, including mathematics, economics, and political science—are interested in the design and theoretical evaluation of voting rules. Questions of social choice have stimulated ...

We examine the implications, for social choice, of individuals having an intrinsic sense of fairness. Taking the viewpoint that social justice reflects the moral attitudes of the constituent members, we analyze the effect of the intensity of the individual sense of fairness on the solution of Nash bargaining over random allocation procedures. We use a stylized model of university admission poli...

“Social Choice: Recent Developments” Walter Bossert and John A. Weymark In the past quarter century, there has been a dramatic shift of focus in social choice theory, with structured sets of alternatives and restricted domains of the sort encountered in economic problems coming to the fore. This article provides an overview of some of the recent contributions to four topics in normative social ...

Intelligent agents have to be able to merge inputs received from different sources in a coherent and rational way. Recently, several proposals have been made for the merging of structures in which it is possible to encode the preferences of sources [5, 4, 12–14, 1]. Information merging has much in common with the goals of social choice theory: to define operations reflecting the preferences of ...

We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of constituent elements an authority enjoys a vast power of determining the social outcome. We provide ...

We study the possibilities of constructing strategy-proof rules that choose sets of alternatives as a function of agents' preferences over such sets. We consider two restrictions on the domain of individual preferences over sets. Assuming that all singletons are in the range of the rule, we show that only dictatorial rules can be strategy-proof on the larger domain. The smaller domain also allo...