Participatory Objective Design via Preference Elicitation

In standard resource allocation problems, the designer sets the objective function, which captures the central allocation goal, in a top-down manner. The agents primarily participate in the allocation mechanism by reporting their preferences over the items; they cannot influence the objective once the designer sets it. Implicitly, this approach presumes that standard ways of eliciting the agents' preferences adequately represent their true preferences—an assumption which does not hold if agents have preferences not just over the items they receive but also over the objective being optimized. For instance, agents may also have social preferences, such as inequality-aversion, altruism, or similar other-regarding behavior. We cannot express such preferences through standard cardinal utilities or ordinal rankings over the items the designer would typically elicit from the agents.