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In the Beginning There Were n Agents: Founding and Amending a Constitution

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Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13023))

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Abstract

Consider n agents forming an egalitarian, self-governed community. Their first task is to decide on a decision rule to make further decisions. We start from a rather general initial agreement on the decision-making process based upon a set of intuitive and self-evident axioms, as well as simplifying assumptions about the preferences of the agents. From these humble beginnings we derive a decision rule. Crucially, the decision rule also specifies how it can be changed, or amended, and thus acts as a de facto constitution. Our main contribution is in providing an example of an initial agreement that is simple and intuitive, and a constitution that logically follows from it. The naive agreement is on the basic process of decision making – that agents approve or disapprove proposals; that their vote determines either the acceptance or rejection of each proposal; and on the axioms, which are requirements regarding a constitution that engenders a self-updating decision making process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The standard definition of Condorcet Consistency is the selection of the unique Condorcet winner (namely undominated alternative) when it exists. Our definition is a bit more general.

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Acknowledgements

Ehud Shapiro is the Incumbent of The Harry Weinrebe Professorial Chair of Computer Science and Biology. We thank the generous support of the Braginsky Center for the Interface between Science and the Humanities. Nimrod Talmon was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF; Grant No. 630/19). Ben Abramowitz was supported in part by NSF award CCF-1527497.

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Abramowitz, B., Shapiro, E., Talmon, N. (2021). In the Beginning There Were n Agents: Founding and Amending a Constitution. In: Fotakis, D., Ríos Insua, D. (eds) Algorithmic Decision Theory. ADT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13023. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87756-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87756-9_8

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