Social choice rules driven by propositional logic

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified logical framework for social choice rules based on belief revision, modeling social opinions and preferences through propositional logic, and introduces new methods for approval-disapproval-preferential voting.

Contribution

It offers a novel logical approach to social choice, unifying existing rules and proposing new ones based on belief revision principles.

Findings

Different social choice rules emerge from various logical constraints.

A new method for approval-disapproval-preferential voting is introduced.

The framework models social opinions as degrees of belief shared by the population.

Abstract

Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social attribute, its degrees being measured by the fraction of people who share a given opinion. Different known rules and some new ones are obtained depending on which particular constraints are assumed. These constraints allow to model different notions of choiceness. In particular, we give a new method to deal with approval-disapproval-preferential voting.