The Social Entropy Process: Axiomatising the Aggregation of Probabilistic Beliefs

Wilmers, George (2010) The Social Entropy Process: Axiomatising the Aggregation of Probabilistic Beliefs. [MIMS Preprint]

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Abstract

The present work stems from a desire to combine ideas arising from two historically different schemes of probabilistic reasoning, each having its own axiomatic traditions, into a single broader axiomatic framework, capable of providing general new insights into the nature of probabilistic inference in a multiagent context. In the present sketch of our work we first describe briefly the background context, and we then present a set of natural principles to be satisfied by any general method of aggregating the partially defined probabilistic beliefs of several agents into a single probabilistic belief function. We will call such a general method of aggregation a social inference process. Finally we define a particular social inference process, the Social Entropy Process (abbreviated to SEP), which satisfies the principles formulated earlier. SEP has a natural justification in terms of information theory, and is closely related to the maximum entropy inference process: indeed it can be regarded as a natural extension of that inference process to the multiagent context.

Item Type: MIMS Preprint
Subjects: MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 03 Mathematical logic and foundations
MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 60 Probability theory and stochastic processes
MSC 2010, the AMS's Mathematics Subject Classification > 91 Game theory, economics, social and behavioral sciences
Depositing User: Ms Lucy van Russelt
Date Deposited: 18 Jan 2010
Last Modified: 08 Nov 2017 18:18
URI: https://eprints.maths.manchester.ac.uk/id/eprint/1395

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