Collective decision-making with individual confidence scores in the decision rule

Judgment aggregation (JA) studies how to aggregate individual judgments to form collective decisions. Examples are expert panels, legal courts, boards, and councils. The problems investigated in this new field are relevant and common to many situations. Nevertheless, the existing procedures are idealized and, likewise the related problems of preference aggregation in social choice theory, the field is plagued by impossibility theorems. In this paper, we extend standard JA in order to offer a more realistic framework and to escape the impossibility results. We propose to distinguish between abstainers and neutral judgment as well as to model the notion of confidence a group member may have in the decision rule by assigning to each criterion a normalized weight. We then show how this new framework may help us to avoid indecision in most cases.