Decision Theory and Social Choice

Julia Staffel (Colorado): “Updating Incoherent Credences – Extending the Dutch Strategy Argument for Conditionalization”

In this paper, we ask: how should an agent who has incoherent credences update when they learn new evidence? The standard Bayesian answer for coherent agents is that they should conditionalize; however, this updating rule is not defined for incoherent starting credences. We show […]

David Kinney (Santa Fe): “Why Average When You Can Stack? Better Methods for Generating Accurate Group Credences”

Formal and social epistemologists have devoted significant attention to the question of how to aggregate the credences of a group of agents who disagree about the probabilities of events. Most of this work focuses on strategies for calculating the mean credence […]

Susanne Burri and Bryan Roberts (LSE): “The Good News About Killing People”

We propose a ‘Cautionary News Principle’ when justifying the decision to commit an irreversible act, such as one that involves killing. The principle states that whether such a decision is justified depends on the extent of possible cautionary news in the future, whereas confirmatory news can […]

Johanna Thoma (LSE): “Merely Means Paternalist? Prospect Theory and `Debiased’ Welfare Analysis”

Economics has traditionally been opposed to paternalism. However, the findings of behavioural economics have made popular one kind of paternalism that appears to be more innocuous: The kind of paternalism that respects an agent’s ends, or her non-instrumental, intrinsic valuations, […]

Matthew Adler (Duke) “The structure of luck prioritarianism”

Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy.