Social Choice Theory and Artificial Intelligence

Seminar description

Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as the logical foundations of welfare economics. A central problem in social choice theory is how to represent and reason with human preferences. This problem has attracted much attention in many sub-areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) which is the study and design of intelligent agents. Indeed, preference aggregation in social choice theory has played a central role in AI. At the same time, AI has brought new perspectives to the study of representing and reasoning with preferences in social choice theory.  In this seminar, we will study the interrelation between social choice theory and artificial intelligence and how they interact with each other.

Papers used in the Seminar

Vorgehensweise: Jeder Student bekommt ein Paper, das vorgestellt werden soll. Es sollen dabei auch eng verwandte Arbeiten mit einbezogen werden - der Student soll selbst eine entsprechende Literaturrecherche durchführen.

• Ronen I. Brafman, Carmel Domshlak, Solomon Eyal Shimony, Y. Silver: Preferences over Sets. AAAI 2006 (PDF)
• Carmel Domshlak, Ronen I. Brafman: Reasoning With Conditional Ceteris Paribus Preference Statements. KR 2000: 121-132 (PDF)
• Ronen I. Brafman, Moshe Tennenholtz: On the Foundations of Qualitative Decision Theory. AAAI/IAAI, Vol. 2 1996: 1291-1296 (PDF)
• Sébastien Konieczny, Ramón Pino Pérez: Propositional belief base merging or how to merge beliefs/goals coming from several sources and some links with social choice theory. European Journal of Operational Research 160(3): 785-802 (2005). (PDF)
• Samir Chopra, Aditya K. Ghose, Thomas Meyer: Social choice theory, belief merging, and strategy-proofness. Information Fusion 7(1): 61-79 (2006). (PDF)
• Dov Gabbay, Gabriella Pigozzi and Odinaldo Rodrigues, Belief revision, belief merging and voting, 8th Augustus De Morgan Workshop, 2006. (PDF)
• Toby Walsh, Representing and Reasoning with Preferences, AI Magzine, 28(4), 59-70, 2007. (PDF)
• Vincent Conitzer, Tuomas Sandholm: Common Voting Rules as Maximum Likelihood Estimators. UAI 2005: 145-152. (PDF)
• Franz Dietrich and Christian List, Judgment Aggregation under Constraints, in T. Boylan and R. Gekker (eds.), Economics, Rational Choice and Normative Philosophy, London (Routledge), 2008. (PDF)
• Franz Dietrich and Christian List, Arrow's theorem in judgment aggregation, Social Choice and Welfare 29(1): 19-33, 2007. (PDF)
• Pedrito Maynard-Reid II, Daniel J. Lehmann: Representing and Aggregating Conflicting Beliefs. KR 2000: 153-164. (PDF)
• Alon Altman, Moshe Tennenholtz: Ranking systems: the PageRank axioms. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2005: 1-8. (PDF)

Books

• Social choice theory :
  • H. Moulin. Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making . 2004 (ISBN 0521360552).
  • Kenneth Arrow, A.K. Sen, K. Suzumura. Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare. 2002 (ISBN 9780444829146)
• Logic and knowledge representation:
  • Uwe Schöning, Logik für Informatiker. 5. Auflage, Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2000
  • John Sowa. Knowledge Representation. Brooks/Cole 1999

Slides

• Organizational issues (PPT)
• Summary of papers (PPT)