A Qualitative Decision-Making Approach Overlapping Argumentation and Social Choice

Abstract

Collective decision making is classically done via social choice theory with each individual expressing preferences as a (total) order over a given set of alternatives, and the group’s aggregated preference is computed using a voting rule. However, such methods do not take into account the rationale behind preferences. Our research hypothesis is that a decision made by participants understanding the qualitative rationale (i.e., arguments) behind each other’s preferences has better chances to be accepted and used in practice. To this end, we propose a novel qualitative decision process which combines argumentation with computational social choice. We show that a qualitative approach based on argumentation can overcome some of the social choice deficiencies.