Jerome Lang:
Computational Issues in Group Decision Making

Social choice is concerned with designing and evaluating methods of collective decision making. However, it somewhat neglects computational issues: the problem is generally considered to be solved when the existence (or the non-existence) of a procedure meeting some requirements has been shown; more precisely, knowing that the procedure can be computed is generally enough; now, how hard this computation is, and how the procedure should be implemented, have deserved less attention in the social choice community. This is where AI (and operations research, and more generally computer science) comes into play. This is especially true when the set of alternatives has a combinatorial structure. This talk will gives a brief overview of some research issues along these lines.