COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN
ECONOMICS Box 208281
COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 1753 Introduction to Judgment Aggregation Christian List and Ben Polak February 4, 2010 This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment
aggregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected
propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this
introduction is to show how ideas from the familiar theory of preference aggregation can
be extended to this more general case. We first translate a proof of Arrow's impossibility
theorem into the new setting, so as to motivate some of the central concepts and
conditions leading to analogous impossibilities, as discussed in the symposium. We then
consider each of four possible escape-routes explored in the symposium. |
