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Social choice theory or social choice is a branch of welfare economics that studies the processes of collective decision-making.[1] Social choice incorporates insights from economics, mathematics, and game theory to find the best ways to combine individual opinions, preferences, or beliefs into a single coherent measure of the quality of different outcomes, called a social welfare function.[2][3] Social choice theory includes the closely-related field of voting theory,[4][5][6] and is strongly tied to the field of mechanism design, which can be thought of as the combination of social choice with game theory.
Whereas decision theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with groups making decisions, based on the preferences of individuals. Real-world examples include enacting laws under a constitution or voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences.[4]
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