Abstract:
We consider the problem of how societies should be partitioned into classes if individuals express their views about who should be put with whom in the same class. A non-bossy social aggregator depends only on those cells of the individual partitions the society members classify themselves in. This fact allows us to concentrate on a corresponding 'opinion graph' for each profile of views. By means of natural sovereignty, liberalism, and equal treatment requirements, we characterize the non-bossy aggregators generating partitions in which the social classes are refinements of the weakly connected components of the opinion graph.