toko

Well-known member
@suspended been thinking about mechanism desing. and had a question. would you say a social choice function counts as a spirit of a procedure/law or the letter of the law. Its formualic and logically defined which makes it seem to be more the "letter", but at the same time it defines some some socially desirable end state which becomes implemented by some mechanism. this which makes me think it tries to define some spirit of the game purely in terms of logic.
 
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sus

Well-known member
@suspended been thinking about mechanism desing. and had a question. would you say a social choice function counts as a spirit of a procedure/law or the letter of the law. Its formualic and logically defined which makes it seem to be more the "letter", but at the same time it defines some some socially desirable end state which becomes implemented by some mechanism. this which makes me think it tries to define some spirit of the game purely in terms of logic.
I don't quite understand what a social choice function is, can you illuminate or give an example?
 

toko

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Basically it comes from social choice theory. you take some set of preferences for each individual in the system and then create a function to translate those preferences into some collective group decision. It's used in voting systems for example
 
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toko

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It's a way of aggregating preferences/utility between a group of individuals. I.e logically formalizing collective decision making. Mechnaism design is a layer on top of this. It involves creating some incentive system or "mechanism" to "implement" the social welfare/choice function via incentives.

The reason why I ask is because I was reading an article about mechanism design and some of it's practical issues when used as a tool of public policy.


I think there's a connection between her critique and your idea of surrogation. specifically mechanism design is often a surrogate for "justice" because mechanism design based systems are more seemingly objective and tractable. They can more easily get public buy in. Hitzig uses the Boston school system as a case study of this phenomenon.
 
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toko

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I don't quite understand what a social choice function is, can you illuminate or give an example?
Yeah so for example given a list of people's preferences for who should be president a social choice function picks a winner
 
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