Social choice theory

Social choice theory or social choice is a branch of welfare economics that analyzes mechanisms and procedures for 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]

Whereas decision theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with groups making choices 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]

  1. ^ Amartya Sen (2008). "Social Choice,". The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, Abstract & TOC.
  2. ^ For example, in Kenneth J. Arrow (1951). Social Choice and Individual Values, New York: Wiley, ch. II, section 2, A Notation for Preferences and Choice, and ch. III, "The Social Welfare Function".
  3. ^ Fishburn, Peter C. (1974). "Social Choice Functions". SIAM Review. 16: 63–90. doi:10.1137/1016005.
  4. ^ Zwicker, William S.; Moulin, Herve (2016), Brandt, Felix; Conitzer, Vincent; Endriss, Ulle; Lang, Jerome (eds.), "Introduction to the Theory of Voting", Handbook of Computational Social Choice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–56, doi:10.1017/cbo9781107446984.003, ISBN 978-1-107-44698-4, retrieved 2021-12-24

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