I just finished an introduction to social choice theory as the formal study of mechanisms for collective decision making. The article presents all the required background to start in this discipline. I reached this paper through the website of UVA and I consider that the concepts presented in the paper could be applied to a lot of use cases, for instance matchmaking of organizations and public contracts or maybe to mediation in Linked Data. Now I am also very interested in works related to “The Wisdom of Crowds” and, on the best of my knowledge, this kind of research and tools can help to validate the results generated by a crowd. There are also other relevant concepts and definitions I did not know (in this context) such as: dictatorship, liberalism, positive responsiveness or manipulation among others . Furthermore, author presents somo logic concepts that have emerged to support social choice theory with a formal syntax and semantics. Thus there are approches based on FOL, HOL and others trying to formalize the underlying concepts of this theory. I would like to highlight the “Doctrinal Paradox” that makes me feel uncomfortable with existing methods of judging being that using a “premise-based procedure” or a “conclusion-based procedure” to get a decision, the final result can change although both procedures are correct!
If you are interested in this kind of work or research, you can follow the Autumm Course about Computational Social Choice teached by Ulle Endriss as part of a Logics master.
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