Veranstaltung

Main texts:

• Moulin, H. 1988. Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making. Cambridge University Press.
• List, C. and Puppe, C. 2009. Judgement Aggregation. A survey. In: The Handbook of rational & social choice. P. Anand, P. Pattanaik, C. Puppe (Eds.). Oxford University Press.

Secondary texts:

• Sen, A. K. 1970. Collective Choice and Social Welfare. Holden-Day.
• Gaertner, W. 2009. A Primer in Social Choice Theory. Revised edition. Oxford University Press.
• Gaertner, W. 2001. Domain Conditions in Social Choice Theory. Cambridge University Press.

How should (political) candidates be elected? What are good ways of merging individual judgments into collective judgments? Social Choice Theory is the systematic study and comparison of how groups and societies can come to collective decisions.

The course offers a rigorous and comprehensive treatment of judgment and preference aggregation as well as voting theory. It is divided into two parts. The first part deals with (general binary) aggregation theory and builds towards a general impossibility result that has the famous Arrow theorem as a corollary. The second part treats voting theory. Among other things, it includes prooving the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

Workload:
Total workload for 4.5 credit points: approx. 135 hours
Attendance: 30 hours
Self-study: 105 hours