Title
Impossibility Theorems and the Universal Algebraic Toolkit
Abstract
We elucidate a close connection between the Theory of Judgment Aggregation (more generally, Evaluation Aggregation), and a relatively young but rapidly growing field of universal algebra, that was primarily developed to investigate constraint satisfaction problems. Our connection yields a full classification of non-binary evaluations into possibility and impossibility domains both under the idempotent and the supportive conditions. Prior to the current result E. Dokow and R. Holzman nearly classified non-binary evaluations in the supportive case, by combinatorial means. The algebraic approach gives us new insights to the easier binary case as well, which had been fully classified by the above authors. Our algebraic view lets us put forth a suggestion about a strengthening of the Non-dictatorship criterion, that helps us avoid "outliers" like the affine subspace. Finally, we give upper bounds on the complexity of computing if a domain is impossible or not (to our best knowledge no finite time bounds were given earlier).
Year
Venue
Field
2015
CoRR
Discrete mathematics,Algebraic number,Affine space,Algebra,Computer science,Pure mathematics,Outlier,Impossibility,Constraint satisfaction problem,Idempotence,Universal algebra,Binary number
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1506.01315
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
17
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mario Szegedy13358325.80
Yixin Xu2214.46