5:00 pm Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Math Club Talk: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem by Frank Lin in RLM 11.176
Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem is a seminal result (comparable to Godel's incompleteness theorems) in economics, specifically social choice theory - broadly the study of taking individual preferences over a set (of almost anything you can think of - resource distribution, laws, candidates for presidency) and making a collective decision. By formalizing the setting in terms of set theory, he showed that if some arguably mild, sensible restrictions are imposed on the social choice function, no such function exists. We will look at Arrow's theorem and some related impossibility results, including Sen's paradox. I'll try to balance formal mathematics (requiring a small amount of logic and set theory) with interpretations from economics and ethics. Submitted by
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