Interview with Eden Hartman: Investigating social choice problems

In their paper Reducing Leximin Fairness to Utilitarian Optimization, Eden Hartman, Yonatan Aumann, Avinatan Hassidim and Erel Segal-Halevi present a scheme for addressing social choice problems. In this interview, Eden tells us more about such problems, the team's methodology, and why this is such a fascinating and challenging area for study. The paper looks at social choice problems -- situations where a group of people (called agents) must make a decision that affects everyone. For example, imagine we need to decide how to divide an inheritance among several heirs. Each agent has their own preferences over the possible outcomes, and the goal is to choose the outcome that is "best" for society as a whole.