Abstract
The aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected issues often leads to collective inconsistency. This study examines two collective decision-making procedures designed to avoid such inconsistency—one premise-based and the other conclusion-based. While the relative desirability of the two procedures has been studied extensively from a theoretical perspective, the preference of individuals regarding the two procedures has been less studied empirically. In the present study, a scenario-based questionnaire survey of participant preferences for the two procedures was conducted, taking into consideration prevailing social norms in the society to which the participants belong and the heterogeneity of the participants’ past experiences. Results show that a minority opinion not matching a prevailing social norm is more likely to be supported when the conclusion-based procedure is used. This can be explained by a basic property of the conclusion-based procedure: The procedure does not require voters to reveal their reasons for reaching a particular conclusion. This property proves appealing for participants who have a minority opinion. Such a finding is highly relevant to future studies on strategic behaviors in choosing a collective decision-making procedure.
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This work was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellows Grant number 13J05358.
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This experiment was conducted when the author belonged to Japan Society of the Promotion of Science, and Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, School of Advanced Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies). This experiment was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies with the receipt number 2015008.
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Sekiguchi, T. Preferences over procedures and outcomes in judgment aggregation: an experimental study. Theory Decis 86, 239–258 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-018-9678-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-018-9678-4