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In the societal tradeoffs problem, each agent perceives certain quantitative tradeoffs between pairs of activities, and the goal is to aggregate these tradeoffs across agents. This is a problem in social choice; specifically, it is a type of quantitative judgment aggregation problem. A natural rule for this problem was axiomatized by Conitzer et al. [AAAI 2016]; they also provided several algorithms for computing the outcomes of this rule. In this paper, we present a significantly improved algorithm and evaluate it experimentally. Our algorithm is based on a tight connection to minimum-cost flow that we exhibit. We also show that our algorithm cannot be improved without breakthroughs on min-cost flow.
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This content will become publicly available on December 10, 2025
Aggregating Quantitative Relative Judgments: From Social Choice to Ranking Prediction
Quantitative Relative Judgment Aggregation (QRJA) is a new research topic in (computational) social choice. In the QRJA model, agents provide judgments on the relative quality of different candidates, and the goal is to aggregate these judgments across all agents. In this work, our main conceptual contribution is to explore the interplay between QRJA in a social choice context and its application to ranking prediction. We observe that in QRJA, judges do not have to be people with subjective opinions; for example, a race can be viewed as a "judgment" on the contestants' relative abilities. This allows us to aggregate results from multiple races to evaluate the contestants' true qualities. At a technical level, we introduce new aggregation rules for QRJA and study their structural and computational properties. We evaluate the proposed methods on data from various real races and show that QRJA-based methods offer effective and interpretable ranking predictions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2307106
- PAR ID:
- 10559237
- Publisher / Repository:
- Curran Associates
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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