Abstract
Collective decision-making in multi-agents systems is classically performed by employing social choice theory methods. Each member of the group (i.e. agent) expresses preferences as a (total) order over a given set of alternatives, and the group’s aggregated preference is computed using a voting rule. Nevertheless, classic social choice methods do not take into account the rationale behind agents’ preferences. Our research hypothesis is that a decision made by a group of participants understanding the qualitative rationale (expressed by arguments) behind each other’s preferences has better chances to be accepted and used in practice. Accordingly, in this work, we propose a novel qualitative procedure which combines argumentation with computational social choice for modelling the collective decision-making problem. We show that this qualitative approach produces structured preferences that can overcome major deficiencies that appear in the social choice literature and affect most of the major voting rules. Hence, in this paper we deal with the Condorcet paradox and the properties of monotonicity and Homogeneity which are unsatisfiable by many voting rules.
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Notes
Please note that for the sake of clarity, we are not drawing all the edges in the argumentation graph, but a subset of the edges demonstrating the attacks between preference relation arguments and ranking arguments.
Please note that we assume that no odd-length attack cycle may exist between generic arguments in the argumentation framework (such cases would be handled during the actual deliberation). Indeed, allowing the existence of odd-length cycles could lead to the computation of an empty extension which is not a coherent preference, since it is the result of an ambiguous deliberation and no ranking argument would be justified.
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Acknowledgements
The research was implemented with a scholarship from IKY funded by the action “Support of Postdoctoral Researchers” from the resources of the EP “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning” with priority axes 6, 8, 9 and is co-funded by the European Social Fund-ESF and the Greek state. This publication has been written with the support of the AgreenSkills+ fellowship programme which has received funding from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme under Grant Agreement No. FP7-609398 (AgreenSkills+ contract).
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A preliminary version containing only some of the results of this paper, entitled “A Qualitative Decision-Making Approach Overlapping Argumentation and Social Choice”, appeared in the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory (ADT ’17).
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Bisquert, P., Croitoru, M., Kaklamanis, C. et al. A decision-making approach where argumentation added value tackles social choice deficiencies. Prog Artif Intell 8, 229–239 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13748-019-00173-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13748-019-00173-3