The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the agents …

We present two texts from Roman Empire times that add two early appearances to the stream of the history of Social Choice Theory. One is from the School of Rhetoric of Quintilian (35–96), a contemporary of Pliny the Younger, who developed an early …

We study the school choice problem and propose a new criterion for comparing non-strategy-proof mechanisms: robustness to manipulations. Mechanism A is more robust than mechanism B if each student (given any preferences of this student and any …

I propose a framework to evaluate the social gains from policies regarding animals. The model considers both the welfare of animals and humans. The gains in animal welfare are estimated by considering the violations of the animals’ fundamental …

John Broome (Proc Aristot Soc 91:87–101, 1990) has developed an influential theory of fairness, which has generated a thriving debate about the nature of fairness. In its initial conception, Broomean fairness is limited to a comparative notion.

Shortlisting is the task of reducing a long list of alternatives to a (smaller) set of best or most suitable alternatives. Shortlisting is often used in the nomination process of awards or in recommender systems to display featured objects. In …

We introduce a new approach for designing rules for participatory budgeting, the problem of deciding on the use of public funds based directly on the views expressed by the citizens concerned. The core idea is to embed instances of the …

Patient and Pareto responsive (pPr) societal preferences were introduced and studied in Khan and Stinchcombe (2018). This paper develops a tractable subclass of the pPr preferences that satisfy a strong equity criterion formulated to match …

Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding k matchings fairly representing everyone’s preferences. To formalize fairness, we apply the concept of proportional representation as studied in …

Population axiology concerns how to rank populations by the relation “is socially preferred to”. So far, population ethicists have (with important exceptions) focused less on the question of how to rank population prospects, that is, alternatives …

Animal agriculture encompasses global markets with large externalities from animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions. We formally study these social costs by embedding an animal inclusive social welfare function into a climate-economy model …

We consider a set of voters making a collective decision via simultaneous vote on two binary issues. Voters’ preferences are captured by payoffs assigned to combinations of outcomes for each issue and they can be nonseparable: a voter’s preference …

This paper describes an empiric study of aggregation and deliberation—used during citizens’ workshops—for the elicitation of collective preferences over 20 different ecosystem services (ESs) delivered by the Palavas coastal lagoons located on the …

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, formally, an ambiguity in the exercise of political influence. To wit: A voter might exert influence with an eye toward maximizing the probability that the political system (1) obtains the correct (e.g.

We regret that during proof correction stage, the following errors were inadvertently made by our production team: …

This paper explores the possibility, in case of belief and taste heterogeneity, to aggregate individual preferences through a deliberation process enabling society to reach a consensus. However, we show that the same deliberation process, even …

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent …