This talk on Social Choice Functions was held on Wednesday November 8, 2017 in MC 4045. The talk was given by Sidhant Saraogi.
Abstract
Social choice functions help aggregate the opinions of many agents. Social choice problems arise in examples as varied as citizens voting in an election, committees deciding on alternatives, and independent computational agents making collective decisions. We aim to study social choice theory through the lens of boolean functions, and study concepts such as influence and noise stability, which provide analogues for natural concepts in the study of social choice. We will finish off by looking at the famous Arrow’s Theorem often popularly stated as “the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship”.