whpearson comments on Meetup : Group Decision Making (the good, the bad, and the confusion of welfare economics) - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Davidmanheim 30 April 2013 04:18PM

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Comment author: whpearson 01 May 2013 07:05:51PM *  0 points [-]

Just reading up on welfare economics a bit, so apologies if I say anything incorrect. I have a lot to read up on!

The problem is that there is a wide gulf between making decisions and delegating someone to do so.

True. My approach does rely on delegating decisions to actors. The open question in my mind is if we can create systems such that actors are encouraged to make good decisions or adopt good decision making processes*.

From my point of view some form of welfare economics (or decision markets) may be one of the processes that actor would be have incentives to adopt. But it may well be able to stand on its own two feet.

*And decision processes would be evaluated by a general situation rather than specific decisions.

At the moment I would ideally sum normalised deltas in utility of a situation for an agent. But that is the weakest part of the system, it is open to manipulation somewhat.

Comment author: Davidmanheim 02 May 2013 10:52:58PM 1 point [-]

The problem with electing (human) agents is that you suddenly have principle-agent problems. Their priorities change if they gain status from being selected, whether it's because they want to be re-selected, or because their time in power is limited, or because it is unlimited. If they don't gain anything by being selected, you are likely to have no incentive for them to invest in making optimal decisions.

Even if this is untrue, you need to project their decisions, typically by assuming you know something about their utility; if this projection is mis-specified even a bit, the difference can be catastrophic; their utility also may not be stationary. So their are some issues there, but they are interesting ones.

Comment author: whpearson 04 May 2013 07:31:09PM 0 points [-]

Thanks! I suspected there was terminology for the principle-agent problem, but didn't know what to google.

Agreed upon it being a big issue. I suppose I am interested in whether we can ameliorate them, so that there are fewer of the issues, rather than eliminate them entirely.

I'll keep an eye out for any follow ups you do to this meetup.