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  1. How common standards can diminish collective intelligence: a computational study.Michael Morreau & Aidan Lyon - 2016 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 22 (4):483-489.
    Making good decisions depends on having accurate information – quickly, and in a form in which it can be readily communicated and acted upon. Two features of medical practice can help: deliberation in groups and the use of scores and grades in evaluation. We study the contributions of these features using a multi-agent computer simulation of groups of physicians. One might expect individual differences in members’ grading standards to reduce the capacity of the group to discover the facts on which (...)
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  • Multidimensional Concepts and Disparate Scale Types.Brian Hedden & Jacob M. Nebel - 2024 - Philosophical Review 133 (3):265-308.
    Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...)
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  • Extensive Measurement in Social Choice.Jacob M. Nebel - 2024 - Theoretical Economics 19 (4):1581-1618.
    Extensive measurement is the standard measurement-theoretic approach for constructing a ratio scale. It involves the comparison of objects that can be concatenated in an additively representable way. This paper studies the implications of extensively measurable welfare for social choice theory. We do this in two frameworks: an Arrovian framework with a fixed population and no interpersonal comparisons, and a generalized framework with variable populations and full interpersonal comparability. In each framework we use extensive measurement to introduce novel domain restrictions, independence (...)
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  • The Sum of Well-Being.Jacob M. Nebel - 2023 - Mind 132 (528):1074–1104.
    Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...)
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  • Strong dictatorship via ratio-scale measurable utilities: a simpler proof.Jacob M. Nebel - 2023 - Economic Theory Bulletin 11 (1):101-106.
    Tsui and Weymark (Economic Theory, 1997) have shown that the only continuous social welfare orderings on the whole Euclidean space which satisfy the weak Pareto principle and are invariant to individual-specific similarity transformations of utilities are strongly dictatorial. Their proof relies on functional equation arguments which are quite complex. This note provides a simpler proof of their theorem.
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  • Interpersonal Comparisons of What?Jean Baccelli - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (1):5-41.
    I examine the once popular claim according to which interpersonal comparisons of welfare are necessary for social choice. I side with current social choice theorists in emphasizing that, on a narrow construal, this necessity claim is refuted beyond appeal. However, I depart from the opinion presently prevailing in social choice theory in highlighting that on a broader construal, this claim proves not only compatible with, but even comforted by, the current state of the field. I submit that all in all, (...)
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  • Ethics without numbers.Jacob Nebel - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):289-319.
    This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...)
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  • Aggregation Without Interpersonal Comparisons of Well‐Being.Jacob M. Nebel - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1):18-41.
    This paper is about the role of interpersonal comparisons in Harsanyi's aggregation theorem. Harsanyi interpreted his theorem to show that a broadly utilitarian theory of distribution must be true even if there are no interpersonal comparisons of well-being. How is this possible? The orthodox view is that it is not. Some argue that the interpersonal comparability of well-being is hidden in Harsanyi's premises. Others argue that it is a surprising conclusion of Harsanyi's theorem, which is not presupposed by any one (...)
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