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Ordinary citizens are rarely charged with making consequential decisions in representative democracies. Almost all consequential decisions are delegated to elected representatives or political appointees. On what basis should we judge whether decisions should be placed in the hands of ordinary citizens or delegated to political elites? I argue that decision-making authority should be allocated in whatever way an assembly of randomly selected citizens would choose, given reasonable beliefs about the consequences of their possible choices. The standard I defend is a variation of the principal-agent model of political representation, in which the people are viewed as a principal and officeholders as their agents. As it is usually formulated, the objectives of the people are defined by the preferences of the majority. I draw on this formulation in chapter 4 to explain why the majority might rationally prefer to delegate authority to a citizens’ assembly instead of an elected legislature and why they might rationally view citizens’ assemblies with distrust, when they are organized and administered by elites. But the standard formulation of the principal-agent model does not provide a coherent standard when the will of the majority is not well-defined. Several chapters on social choice theory explain this problem and why political theorists’ previous responses to it have been unconvincing. In light of this problem, I argue for a revisionary understanding of the principal-agent model, according to which the people and its will are identified not with the preferences of the majority but rather with the decisions of a citizens’ assembly. To motivate this approach I offer a critique of the recent literature on “epistemic democracy,” which describes an alternative form of justification for empowering ordinary citizens. Appeals to expertise and knowledge have historically figured prominently in justifications of political exclusion and hierarchy, but epistemic democrats put them to use in defending participatory forms of democratic politics. Epistemic democrats claim that decision processes in which inexpert, ordinary citizens participate can exhibit greater “collective wisdom” than elite- or expert-dominated decision-making. Chapters 2 and 3 explain why these arguments sit uncomfortably with the nature of disagreements in politics. / Government

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In my Ph.D. dissertation, I have studied problems arising in various aspects of preferences: preference modeling, preference learning, and preference reasoning, when preferences concern outcomes ranging over combinatorial domains. Preferences is a major research component in artificial intelligence (AI) and decision theory, and is closely related to the social choice theory considered by economists and political scientists. In my dissertation, I have exploited emerging connections between preferences in AI and social choice theory. Most of my research is on qualitative preference representations that extend and combine existing formalisms such as conditional preference nets, lexicographic preference trees, answer-set optimization programs, possibilistic logic, and conditional preference networks; on learning problems that aim at discovering qualitative preference models and predictive preference information from practical data; and on preference reasoning problems centered around qualitative preference optimization and aggregation methods. Applications of my research include recommender systems, decision support tools, multi-agent systems, and Internet trading and marketing platforms.

Les développements récents en économie du bien-être ouvrent la voie à des méthodes d’évaluations reposant sur d’autres modèles de justice sociale que l’utilitarisme. Leur faisabilité dans les pratiques quotidiennes d’évaluation des interventions de santé pose question : l’objectif de cette thèse est de contribuer d’y répondre. Pour cela nous nous sommes intéressés à trois cas pratiques. L’objectif du Chapitre I est de comparer les méthodologies d’évaluation de trois agences publiques d’évaluation, le NICE (Grande-Bretagne), l’IQWiG (Allemagne) et le KCE (Belgique), pour identifier les positions en matière de justice sociale qui en découlent. Le Chapitre II propose d’étudier le dilemme moral que suscite le phénomène d’adaptation des préférences dans l’évaluation deux dispositifs de compensation du handicap. Trois options sont avancées résoudre ce dilemme, elles s’appuient sur les théories de la justice sociale égalitaristes. Enfin, le Chapitre III démontre la faisabilité de l’approche revenu équivalent-santé, développée par Fleurabey, dans l’aide à la décision publique, au sujet des traitements antihypertenseurs en prévention primaire / Welfare economics encompasses other public choice theories besides utilitarianism, like egalitarian social justice theory. Whether these economic frameworks provide practical tools that could be used in health technology assessment is an ongoing debate, and this study aim to contribute to answer this question. The aim of the first chapter is to review health economic evaluation guidelines and compare methods from three national health technology assessment agencies - NICE (England and Wales), IQWiG (Germany) and KCE (Belgium) - and to assess what social justice principles are implied by their methodological choices. The second chapter studies the moral dilemma raised by adaptive preferences in growth hormones treatment and bilateral cochlear implants. Three options are put forward to solve this dilemma: they are grounded on egalitarian social justice theories. The objective of the third chapter is to provide evidence about the feasibility of assessment based on equivalent income approach, developed by M. Fleurbaey, in the context of public decision making. For this application case, we focussed on antihypertensive treatments in primary prevention

A well-known fact about positional election procedures is that its ranking of m alternatives can change when some of the alternatives are removed from consideration—given a positional procedure on each of 2, 3, …, m alternatives and a collective preference order for each distinct subset of the m alternatives. Saari has established that with few exceptions, we can find a voter profile for which the collective preference order for each subset under the according positional procedure is the one given. However, Saari's results do not quantify the likelihood of finding such voter profiles. For small numbers of alternatives, William Gehrlein developed a statistical model to explore the probabilities that particular collective preference orders on subsets of alternatives can occur for large electorates. One goal of this research is to determine whether changes in the collective preference order as alternatives are removed can be considered to be the norm or an outlier for positional procedures. This dissertation extends the research headed by Gehrlein in two directions. One, I generalize his statistical model to explore probabilities for iterated election procedures. Gehrlein's model previously produced results only for three alternatives and in limited cases for four alternatives. I have extended this model to produce results for up to five alternatives, including analysis of instant-runoff voting and runoff elections. Two, Gehrlein's model required specific conditions on the probability distribution of individual voter preferences across the population. I relax this assumption so that for any probability distribution of individual voter preferences across the population, I can explore the probability that a collective preference order is inconsistent with the outcomes when alternatives are removed. These results provide a foundation for discussing the impact of removing alternatives on elections across all large electorates. I also apply these results to two recent United States elections wherein a third-party candidate received a significant share of the votes: the 1992 U.S. Presidential election and the 1998 Minnesota Gubernatorial election. Overall, my research will suggest that as the number of alternatives increases, the likelihood of finding changes in the collective preference order as alternatives are removed will approach one.

This thesis studies ultrafilters and their various applications in topology, social choice theory and construction of a nonstandard universe. First of all, we introduce basic properties of ultrafilters and show how to use them to construct nonstandard framework. Next, we prove Arrow's impossibility theorem which states that every electoral system with a finite set of voters satisfying certain natural conditions necessarily admits at least one dictator who determines the society's preferences. However, if the set of voters is infinite, this is not true anymore and ultrafilters play a key role in the proof. We present two counterexamples in the infinite case using nonstandard framework. A similar theorem holds in the case where the preferences are real functions. Again, we show two examples of electoral systems that are not dictatorial - one using Banach limits and the other using hyperfinite sums. Finally, we use the ultrafilters to construct the Čech-Stone compactification of natural numbers. We show that the nonstandard enlargement of natural numbers equipped with suitable topology is the Čech-Stone compactification of the set of natural numbers. 1

Following the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, politicians, media, and lobbyists rendered a number of conflicting and confusing interpretations of its merits and demerits. Such interpretations intensified the skepticism and concerns of small business enterprise (SBE) owners. The purpose of this study was to develop a representative, prioritized list of SBE owners' concerns or resistance factors. The goal was to create a useful guide for SBE owners who are seeking ways to reducing the adverse financial impact of the law. With social choice theory as the theoretical framework, 50 randomly selected SBE owners across 5 distinct industry groups from Richmond, Virginia, participated in an online, cross-sectional, pairwise comparison survey. The overall results of an analytic hierarchy process indicated that the top-ranked resistance factor of SBE owners was insurance premiums, followed by quality of care and the tax burden. However, these rankings were not uniform among industry groups. With a focus on these crucial concerns, SBE owners could benefit by seeking approaches to reduce the business costs of health care. The implications for positive social change include the potential for business organizations, researchers, and policymakers to channel SBE owners' voice for a socioeconomic growth by addressing their concerns in seeking improvements from the ACA.

For the last thirty years or so, there has been a search underway for a theory that canaccommodate our intuitions in regard to moral duties to future generations. The object ofthis search has proved surprisingly elusive. The classical moral theories in the literature allhave perplexing implications in this area. Classical Utilitarianism, for instance, implies thatit could be better to expand a population even if everyone in the resulting populationwould be much worse off than in the original. The main problem has been to find an adequate population theory, that is, a theoryabout the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of theirlives, and their identities may vary. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has totake these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normativestatus of actions, the study of population theory is of general import for moral theory. A number of theories have been proposed in the literature that purport to avoidcounter-intuitive implications such as the one mentioned above. The suggestions arediverse: introducing novel ways of aggregating welfare into a measure of value, revising thenotion of a, life worth living, questioning the way we can compare and measure welfare,counting people's welfare differently depending on the temporal location or the modalfeatures of their lives, and challenging the logic of axiological and normative concepts. Weinvestigate the concepts and assumptions involved in these theories as well as theirimplications for population theory. In our discussion, we propose a number of intuitively appealing and logically weakadequacy conditions for an acceptable population theory. Finally, we consider whether it ispossible to find a theory that satisfies all of these conditions. We prove that no such theory exists.

In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide a guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision- making by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is bounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act in a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining the current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they are to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without having an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make rational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state of its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic functioning of a control room agent: 1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to facilitate logical analysis? 2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new information? 3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different sources? In describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav- ing both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted. The central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in nature, is the concept of a templated ordering. Representing the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem- plated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs of an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both knowledge and belief. A control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic change algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of belief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update. The combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re- ceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic representation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is developed. / School of Computing / Ph. D. (Computer Science)