Formal Approaches to Social Procedures

Social procedures that have algorithmic aspects can often be improved by redesign. This holds for voting and other peaceful decision making procedures, for match-making, for auctioning, for fair division of estates, and for many procedures of distributive justice. The algorithmic aspects can be analyzed with formal methods. The term “social software” was coined by Rohit Parikh (2002) for the emerging interdisciplinary enterprise that is concerned with the design and analysis of algorithms that regulate social processes. Such analysis and (re-)design uses methods from logic, game theory and theoretical computer science. The goals of research in formal approaches to social procedures are modeling social situations, developing theories of correctness, and (re-)designing social procedures.

Logic, game theory and computer science are not the only disciplines that have something to say about social mechanisms. Such mechanisms are also an object of study in voting theory, in auction theory, in social choice theory, in mechanism design theory, and in algorithmic game theory. Multi-agent interaction at a more abstract level is studied in artificial intelligence and distributed computing, so all these disciplines have something to say about the formal analysis of social interaction.