The Possibility of Bayesian Social Choice

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stephan Hartmann, since 9/2021
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; Practical Philosophy
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426170771

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Philosophical analyses of decision making tend to be predominantly individualistic. That is, they consider how an individual should act given their beliefs and preferences. Yet almost all societally significant decisions require collective decision making; even when made by single individuals, they require one to weigh competing beliefs, preferences, and values. This requires an analysis of how to aggregate beliefs to get a decision-making procedure that adequately incorporates the interests of the individuals. The central aim of this project was to explore the extent to which normative theories designed for individual decision making could be extended to yield a theory of rational collective decision making. After presenting core results regarding the extension of the individualistic concepts of risk aversion and utility to the social context, the project went on to explore the relationship between the individual and collective in the context of the empirical study of racial discrimination. This led to an analysis of the conditions under which it is fruitful to use causal methods to study discrimination as well as an argument for why purely statistical methods are inadequate for empirically detecting racial discrimination by police.

Publications

• SUPPORT FOR GEOMETRIC POOLING. The Review of Symbolic Logic, 16(1), 298-337.
  BACCELLI, JEAN & STEWART, RUSH T.
  
• Risk aversion over finite domains. Theory and Decision, 93(2), 371-397.
  Baccelli, Jean; Schollmeyer, Georg & Jansen, Christoph
  
• "The Myside Bias in Argument Evaluation: A Bayesian Model." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 44, no. 44.
  Baccini, Edoardo & Stephan Hartmann
  
• Deliberation and confidence change. Synthese, 200(1).
  Heinzelmann, Nora & Hartmann, Stephan
  
• Path-Specific Discrimination
  Weinberger, N.
  
• Interpersonal Comparisons of What?. The Journal of Philosophy, 120(1), 5-41.
  Baccelli, Jean
  
• Ordinal Utility Differences. SSRN Electronic Journal.
  Baccelli, Jean
  
• Signal Manipulation and the Causal Analysis of Racial Discrimination. Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 9(0).
  Weinberger, Naftali
  
• The Insufficiency of Statistics for Detecting Racial Discrimination by Police. Philosophy of Science, 91(5), 1089-1097.
  Weinberger, Naftali
  
• The Sure-Thing Principle. SSRN Electronic Journal.
  Baccelli, Jean & Hartmann, Lorenz
  
• The Wisdom of the Small Crowd: Myside Bias and Group Discussion. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 26(4).
  Baccini, Edoardo; Christoff, Zoé; Hartmann, Stephan & Verbrugge, Rineke