Aggregation across disciplines: connections and frameworks

16.12.2021 - 17.12.2021

Workshop coordinated by William Zwicker, Professor of Mathematics at Union College New York - USA, invited by THEMA and fellow-in-residence at CY AS and by Marcus Pivato, Professor of Economics at UFR Économie-Gestion (CYU) and member of THEMA laboratory

Topic: Aggregation is a core concern in a variety of related disciplines: Voting, Judgement Aggregation, Belief Aggregation, Participatory Budgeting, Representative (aka “two-stage”) Democracy, etc.  Within those fields, a great variety of aggregation procedures have been proposed, each with desirable and undesirable properties.  What helpful things can we say to each other across disciplines and across rules?

• Across disciplines: What is interesting and provocative in your area that may have cross-over appeal in the other disciplines – which new or different aggregation procedures or axiomatic properties deserve wider attention?
• Across rules: Choosing an aggregation procedure means weighing the relative importance of the desirable and undesirable properties in light of the particular context at hand.  To put such a weighing process on a more rational basis it is helpful to have a general framework that allows wholesale comparisons of the procedures that fit that framework.  Distance rationalization is one example of such a framework, but it is not the only one: based on our current knowledge it seems quite unlikely that any single framework will capture all procedures.  Which frameworks have proven useful in your own discipline?  

Organization: The workshop will take place in the Auditorium of MIR on 16 and 17 December over 2 full days, with 7 -10 talks per day, of 30 - 45 minutes each, and a good amount of time between talks for questions and discussion.

The conference program and other information will be published on the dedicated website set up for the conference: 

https://sites.google.com/view/december21/home