The Social Entropy Process: Axiomatising theAggregation of Probabilistic Beliefs

The present work stems from a desire to combine ideas arising from two historically different schemes of probabilistic reasoning, each having its own axiomatic traditions, into a single broader axiomatic framework, capable of providing general new insights into the nature of probabilistic inference in a multiagent context. In the present sketch of our work we first describe briefly the background context, and we then present a set of natural principles to be satisfied by any general method of aggregating the partially defined probabilistic beliefs of several agents into a single probabilistic belief function. We will call such a general method of aggregation a social inference process. Finally we define a particular social inference process, the Social Entropy Process (abbreviated to SEP), which satisfies the principles formulated earlier. SEP has a natural justification in terms of information theory, and is closely related to the maximum entropy inference process: indeed it can be regarded as a natural extension of that inference process to the multiagent context.