The first Workshop on Opinion Aggregation, Dynamics, and Elicitation (WADE) will be held in Cornell University, Ithaca, NY on June 22, 2018 in conjunction with the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC)
Workshop Theme
Traditional social choice has concerned itself with aggregating discrete outcomes via voting. Increasingly, there is a need to aggregate opinions. For instance, consider the problem of designing the capital budget of a city or country. Or eliciting what trade-offs are worth making to mitigate the effect of climate change. On such issues, there are a spectrum of opinions, most of which are quite complex, and many of which are ill-informed.
At the same time, crowdsourcing and complex polling are in increasing use for subjective opinion: examples are prediction markets, peer assessment, and Bayesian opinion elicitation in the presence of incentives.
This leads to questions like:
- How can voting schemes be adapted to elicit complex preferences?
- How should preferences be aggregated so that the outcomes are a fair representation of societal views?
- Individual preferences are often shaped by networked interactions. How does the dynamics of opinion formation affect the process of eliciting and aggregating opinions?
- Can we design algorithmic approaches to group negotiation and deliberation for social choice problems?
- How do we incentivize participation, effort, and truthful reporting in opinion aggregation?
- Finally, how should platforms and mechanisms be designed to elicit, inform, and aggregate opinions?
The goal of this workshop is to bring together participants from diverse fields that are relevant to such problems — social choice theory, prediction markets, opinion dynamics, and fair resource allocation in order to foster a lively interchange of ideas. The two essential features of work discussed at this workshop are:
- The ultimate goal of the problem or model being discussed is to make a single group or societal decision (eg. as opposed to bandwidth allocation or ad allocation where resources need to be split among participants or recommendation systems where decisions are personalized), and
- Different participants have different utilities, or subjective preferences.
We invite papers of all kinds — theory, empirical, and experimental — related to any of these aspects. The workshop’s submissions site contains more information about submitting papers or panel discussion proposals.
Turing's Invisible Hand 
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