Computation, Communication, Rationality and Incentives in Collective and Cooperative Decision Making – CoCoRICo-CoDec

Our project aims at studying several classes of collective decision problems under three point of views: (a) the impact of the computational difficulties of the mechanisms involved; (b) the impact of their communication requirements; (c) their vulnerability to strategic behaviour. The classes of problems we consider concern groups of agents that have to reach a stable state or a common decision: (1) coalition structure formation, where a central authority has to partition agents into groups; (2) selection of a common alternative, or a collective set of alternatives, subject to some constraints: voting (single-winner elections, committee elections, multiple referenda), group recommendation, multi-facility location; (3) fair allocation of indivisible resources. Our project has a two-dimensional structure: classes of problems (1)--(3) on the one hand, classes of tasks or questions (a)--(c) on the other hand. There will be one work package for each of the main questions (a) to (c), and a work package whose role will be to implement some of the methods and solutions from other work packages on a collective decision platform, which will be tested on real users and used for pedagogical purposes.