Background:
In many situations in real life one (say, a central authority) needs to make a decision based on preferences of many individuals. This occurs not just in politics, but in everyday committee work, in crowd sourcing, paper-reviewing and peer-assessment, scheduling on Doodle, making joint plans and so on. Social choice theory typically studies how to selecting a single “winning” alternative out of several ones, based on the expressed preferences of multiple agents. Ideally, we would like to select a winner that reflects the will of the society, i.e. to aggregate agents’ preferences in a good way. In this course we will overview criteria for good winners and good aggregation methods, study how these criteria may be affected by the context or preference structure, and consider the biases that may be introduced due to strategic behavior.
Goals:
- Students will understand the conceptual, computational, and strategic challenges of aggregating preferences
- Students will be able to choose and/or design an appropriate mechanism for aggregating preferences in various contexts
- מורה: רשף מאיר