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The Future of Economic Design pp 103–112Cite as

Realizing Epistemic Democracy

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Abstract

Many collective decisions depend upon questions about objective facts or probabilities. Several theories in social choice and political philosophy suggest that democratic institutions can obtain accurate answers to such questions. But these theories are founded on assumptions and modelling paradigms that are both implausible and incompatible with one another. I will propose a roadmap for a more realistic and unified approach to this problem.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Melioristic and optimality results are sometimes lumped together and called nonasymptotic ESC results.

  2. 2.

    See Dietrich and Spiekermann (2017) for a recent review of the ESC literature. See also Pivato (2012, 2013) for reviews of the literature on optimality results in particular.

  3. 3.

    See Pivato (2017) for a more detailed summary of this literature.

  4. 4.

    I know of only two models of epistemic social choice which include such effects: Page et al. (2007) and Bednar et al. (2010).

  5. 5.

    See e.g. Acemoğlu and Ozdaglar (2011) and Mossel and Tamuz (2017) for surveys of some interesting mathematical models of opinion dynamics. See Castellano et al. (2009) and Castellano (2012) for surveys of statistical physics models of opinion dynamics.

  6. 6.

    See Lorenz (2007) for an introduction and literature review of computer modelling of social opinion dynamics.

  7. 7.

    See List (2005), Bovens and Rabinowicz (2006), Everaere et al. (2010), Hartmann et al. (2010), Hartmann and Sprenger (2012), Bozbay et al. (2014), Ahn and Oliveros (2014) and D'Alfonso (2016) for preliminary explorations of this approach.

  8. 8.

    This is related to the (supra)Bayesian approach to opinion pooling; see Genest and Zidek (1986, Sect. 4) and Clemen and Winkler (1999; Sect. 2.2) for introductions.

  9. 9.

    See Mongin and Pivato (2017) for an elaboration of this argument. To be clear, we are here talking about the ex ante Pareto axiom (which concerns preferences over social lotteries before the resolution of uncertainty), rather than the ex post Pareto axiom (which concerns preferences over social outcomes after the resolution of uncertainty).

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Acknowledgements

I thank Gabriel Carroll, Franz Dietrich, Umberto Grandi, Justin Leroux, Christian List, Arianna Novaro, Kai Spiekermann, and Bill Zwicker for their very helpful comments. None of them are responsible for any errors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy, France

    Marcus Pivato

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  1. Marcus Pivato
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Correspondence to Marcus Pivato .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS - Paris School of Economics, Paris, France

    Jean-François Laslier

  2. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Hervé Moulin

  3. Université Paris-Dauphine, Université PSL, CNRS, LAMSADE, Paris, France

    M. Remzi Sanver

  4. Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA

    William S. Zwicker

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Pivato, M. (2019). Realizing Epistemic Democracy. In: Laslier, JF., Moulin, H., Sanver, M., Zwicker, W. (eds) The Future of Economic Design. Studies in Economic Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18050-8_16

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