Talk by Prof. Yukio Koriyama (Ecole Polytechnique, France)

Prof. Yukio Koriyama (Ecole Polytechnique, France)
https://sites.google.com/site/yukiok/

Title:
Optimal Apportionment

Abstract:
The principle of decreasing marginal utility provides a theoretical foundation that supports degressive proportionality in apportionment problems, such as the allocation of seats in a federal parliament. Since the preferred alternative of a citizen in a large constituency has a higher frequency to coincide with the alternative chosen by the society, classical utilitarianism at the social level recommends relatively smaller weights to large constituencies, implying that desirable decision rules should exhibit degressive proportionality with respect to the population size. In this talk, we discuss theoretical results as well as the computational challenges that we face.