You need to choose which kind of outcome you prefer in order to choose your aggregation mechanism
Is this really the case? It’s doesn’t seem true of axiomatic approaches to decision-theory in general, so is there a special reason to think it should be true here?
But if you could do that, you wouldn’t need their solution in the first place!
I guess I would view the parliamentary mechanism more as an intuition pump than a “solution” per se. It may well be that, having thought through it’s implications, it will turn out that the results can be represented in (say) the standard vNM framework. Nonetheless, the parliamentary model could still be helpful in getting a handle on the nature of the “utility” functions involved.
As an aside, it seems as though their parliamentary approach could potentially be modeled more effectively using co-operative game theory than the more standard non-cooperative version.
Is this really the case? It’s doesn’t seem true of axiomatic approaches to decision-theory in general, so is there a special reason to think it should be true here?
I just gave the reason. “Some mechanisms will result in always choosing actions from one category; some mechanisms will result in sampling from different categories proportionally to their votes.”
The aggregation mechanism is a lot like the thread priority system in a computer operating system. Some operating systems will always give the CPU to the highest-priority task. Some try to give tasks CPU time proportional to their priority. Likewise, some aggregation mechanisms will choose the most popular option; some choose options with probability proportional to their popularity, never giving any voice to minority opinions. You have to choose which type of aggregation mechanism to use. But this choice is exactly the sort of choice that the parliament is supposed to be producing as output, not requiring as input.
Is this really the case? It’s doesn’t seem true of axiomatic approaches to decision-theory in general, so is there a special reason to think it should be true here?
I guess I would view the parliamentary mechanism more as an intuition pump than a “solution” per se. It may well be that, having thought through it’s implications, it will turn out that the results can be represented in (say) the standard vNM framework. Nonetheless, the parliamentary model could still be helpful in getting a handle on the nature of the “utility” functions involved.
As an aside, it seems as though their parliamentary approach could potentially be modeled more effectively using co-operative game theory than the more standard non-cooperative version.
I just gave the reason. “Some mechanisms will result in always choosing actions from one category; some mechanisms will result in sampling from different categories proportionally to their votes.”
The aggregation mechanism is a lot like the thread priority system in a computer operating system. Some operating systems will always give the CPU to the highest-priority task. Some try to give tasks CPU time proportional to their priority. Likewise, some aggregation mechanisms will choose the most popular option; some choose options with probability proportional to their popularity, never giving any voice to minority opinions. You have to choose which type of aggregation mechanism to use. But this choice is exactly the sort of choice that the parliament is supposed to be producing as output, not requiring as input.