In the Beginning there were n Agents: Founding and Amending a Constitution
Abstract
Consider n agents forming an egalitarian, self-governed community. Their first task is to decide on a decision rule to make further decisions. We start from a rather general initial agreement on the decision-making process based upon a set of intuitive and self-evident axioms, as well as simplifying assumptions about the preferences of the agents. From these humble beginnings we derive a decision rule. Crucially, the decision rule also specifies how it can be changed, or amended, and thus acts as a de facto constitution. Our main contribution is in providing an example of an initial agreement that is simple and intuitive, and a constitution that logically follows from it. The naive agreement is on the basic process of decision making - that agents approve or disapprove proposals; that their vote determines either the acceptance or rejection of each proposal; and on the axioms, which are requirements regarding a constitution that engenders a self-updating decision making process.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2011.03111,
title = {In the Beginning there were n Agents: Founding and Amending a Constitution},
author = {Ben Abramowitz and Ehud Shapiro and Nimrod Talmon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.03111},
year = {2023}
}