Agenda manipulation under doctrinal paradox
摘要
We study the aggregation of individuals’ beliefs into their collective judgment on a certain proposition, called the conclusion, which is logically related to other preliminary propositions. While the literature has highlighted the crucial dependency of voting outcomes on the selection of an agenda—i.e., the set of propositions voted on—the structure of this dependency is not well understood. We introduce two novel premise-based rules, defined through the conjunctive normal form and disjunctive normal form of the conclusion. Our theorem shows that for any profile of voters’ beliefs, these rules respectively yield the highest and lowest voting outcomes, with respect to a given total order over the set of truth values, within the class of all premise-based rules. This result clarifies the extent to which a voting outcome can be manipulated through the selection of an agenda.