Social Welfare Functions

A few weeks ago there was an odd situation that I became aware of in the Ward. The Relief Society was asked to take in meals and provide transportation, while the ward helped with financial support to a non-member family in our neighborhood. Such areas of welfare are outside of my responsibility, but it just seemed odd to me. I found myself asking our Relief Society President, "Are you okay with this? I have my concerns, but I want to support you." She assured me that, while trying to make sure we weren't creating an expectation we couldn't satisfy, she was okay with the current level of support. I have been completely satisfied with her response and have not considered the matter further.

Just recently, something happened at work that brought this welfare example to mind.

I have been on a committee to make a decision. There is not possibility of satisfying everybody, but we were careful in our decisions, took input from the entire faculty, and even tried to explain to dissenters why the compromise was necessary. I took the responsibility of talking to person A, as I thought I had a good relationship with them. I was not able to persuade person A to the committee decision. Person A said, "Well, I thought we usually agreed on everything, but I guess this is a case where we'll have to agree to disagree." I was fine with that. The decision is a difficult one. It is impossible to make everybody happy. HOWEVER, then person A went to person B to air the complaints. Person B then went ballistic – saying all kinds of inflammatory things through email. The upshot is that person B went to the higher ups to proclaim that the decision was inappropriate – making our department look even more dysfunctional than it is already perceived.

How I wish they would have come to the committee and said, "Are you okay with this? I have my concerns, but I want to support you."

It makes me think that maybe I have gotten a little smarter over the years. Part of humility is to value the opinion of others. Getting the result you want absolutely isn't worth destroying relationships. While decisions come and decisions go, when you destroy relationships, you destroy your world.

We just finished talking about making joint decisions in my multi-agent systems course. The first part of the course is in making competitive decisions, but recently we are talking about cooperative decision-making. There are many methods for taking preferences of individual members and coming up with a group ranking. We term them social welfare functions. The methods need to protect against manipulation, but the idea is that the method genuinely tries to combine the wisdom of all participants. My take away is that we need to value the opinion of others enough that WE genuinely want the group decision to prevail.