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Social choice theory is a branch of welfare economics that extends the theory of rational choice to collective decision-making. [1] Social choice studies the behavior of different mathematical procedures ( social welfare functions ) used to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole.
Kenneth Arrow's monograph Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 2nd ed., 1963, 3rd ed., 2012) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor.
Arrow's theorem assumes as background that any non-degenerate social choice rule will satisfy: [15]. Unrestricted domain – the social choice function is a total function over the domain of all possible orderings of outcomes, not just a partial function.
Arrow's impossibility theorem is a key result on social welfare functions, showing an important difference between social and consumer choice: whereas it is possible to construct a rational (non-self-contradictory) decision procedure for consumers based only on ordinal preferences, it is impossible to do the same in the social choice setting ...
Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) is an axiom of decision theory which codifies the intuition that a choice between and should not depend on the quality of a third, unrelated outcome . There are several different variations of this axiom, which are generally equivalent under mild conditions.
Computational social choice is a field at the intersection of social choice theory, theoretical computer science, and the analysis of multi-agent systems. [1] It consists of the analysis of problems arising from the aggregation of preferences of a group of agents from a computational perspective.
His contributions to social choice theory, notably his "impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis are significant. His work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information , was also foundational.
In social choice theory, unrestricted domain, or universality, is a property of social welfare functions in which all preferences of all voters (but no other considerations) are allowed. Intuitively, unrestricted domain is a common requirement for social choice functions, and is a condition for Arrow's impossibility theorem.