Logic-Based Merging in Fragments of Classical Logic with Inputs from Social Choice Theory

摘要

Aggregation. One does not need to look far to find problems which require harmonization of different, possibly conflicting, preferences. Problems of this sort occur, on a grand scale, in national elections. But they also occur on smaller scales, in day-to-day decision processes such as friends settling on a place for lunch, or co-workers choosing available timeslots for a meeting. And, of course, they are encountered in the technical domain: an automated recommender system designed to suggest items to a group of agents, will first have to get an idea of the group's preferences. To do that it should take into account the individual preferences, typically by looking at how they rate various products, and distil them into a portrait of the group's desires [15,16]. Elections, hungry friends and target groups are all situations in which a collection of agents needs to be thought of and modelled as a single agent. And one wonders, naturally, about the best, most efficient way to do this.