On Egalitarian Belief Merging

Abstract

Belief merging aims at defining the beliefs of a group of agents from the beliefs of each member of the group. It is related to more general notions of aggregation from economics (social choice theory). Two main subclasses of belief merging operators exist: majority operators which are related to utilitarianism, and arbitration operators which are related to egalitarianism. Though utilitarian (majority) operators have been extensively studied so far, there is much less work on egalitarian operators. In order to fill the gap, we investigate possible translations in a belief merging framework of some egalitarian properties and concepts coming from social choice theory, such as Sen-Hammond equity, Pigou-Dalton property, median, and Lorenz curves. We study how these properties interact with the standard rationality conditions considered in belief merging. Among other results, we show that the distance-based merging operators satisfying Sen-Hammond equity are mainly those for which leximax is used as the aggregation function.