A measure of distance between judgment sets (Working paper no. 169)

Abstract

In the literature on judgment aggregation, an important open question is how to measure the distance between any two judgment sets. This is relevant for issues of social choice: if two individuals hold different beliefs then we might want to find a compromise that lies somewhere between them. We propose a set of axioms that determine a measure of distance uniquely. This measure differs from the widely used Hamming metric. The difference between Hamming's metric and ours boils down to one axiom. Given judgment sets A and B, this axiom says that if the propositions in A n B jointly imply that the propositions in A - B share the same truth value, then the disagreement between A and B over those propositions in A - B should be counted as a single disagreement. We consider the application of our metric to judgment aggregation, and also use the metric to measure the distance between preference rankings.