(New) 26 November 2026, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Otto de Jong

Abstract

Social choice theory is concerned with settings of collective decision making. In such a setting, a group of voters may voice their (individual) opinions on a matter, and some mechanism should then aggregate these opinions into a fair outcome. A natural follow-up question would then be why that outcome is fair, demanding a justification. Such justifications form the main topic of this seminar. I will discuss them within a framework called binary aggregation (with integrity constraints). A real-world setting that can be expressed in this framework is participatory budgeting, where citizens can vote on how to spend their municipality's budget.

The research presented at this talk is part of my Master's thesis called Structured Justifications for Binary Aggregation, which I wrote at the Master of Logic in 2025 under the supervision of Ronald de Haan.

For more information on the Computational Social Choice Seminar, please consult https://staff.science.uva.nl/u.endriss/seminar/.