Group deliberation and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result

List, Christian (2007) Group deliberation and the transformation of judgments: an impossibility result. PEPP, 26. Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

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Abstract

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility result: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible condition is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility result and argue that successful group deliberation must be ‘holistic’: individuals cannot generally revise their judgments on a proposition based on judgments on that proposition alone but must take other propositions into account too. I discuss the significance of these findings for democratic theory.

Item Type:	Monograph (Discussion Paper)
Official URL:	http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk
Additional Information:	© 2007 Christian List
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Journal of Economic Literature Classification System:	D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D70 - General D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
Sets:	Departments > Government Departments > Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method Collections > Economists Online Research centres and groups > Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) Research centres and groups > Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD)
Identification Number:	26
Date Deposited:	10 Jul 2008 16:15
URL:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19273/

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