Arrow’s impossibility theorem states that if a collective choice rule satisfies unrestricted domain, weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and collective rationality, then there exists a dictator. Among others, Arrow’s postulate of collective rationality is controversial. We propose a new axiom for a collective choice rule, decisiveness coherence, which is weaker than collective...

Without monetary payments, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem proves that under mild requirements all truthful social choice mechanisms must be dictatorships. When payments are allowed, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism truthfully implements the value-maximizing choices, assuming agents’ utilities are quasi-linear in money. We study social choice with payments where utilities are non-quasi-lin...

When voting on a proposal one in fact chooses between two alternatives: (i) A new hypothetical social state depicted by the proposal and (ii) the status quo (henceforth: Reality); a Yes vote favors a transition to the proposed hypothetical state, while a No vote favors Reality. Social Choice theory generalizes voting on one proposal to ranking multiple proposals; that Reality was forsaken durin...

Social choice theory is the study of how decisions are made collectively. It examines the idea that, for a given society, the preferences of individuals can be directly aggregated to reflect a quintessential “social preference.” An example of such a preference aggregation method is simple plurality rule, in which citizens vote for a candidate and the candidate winning the most votes is deemed s...

“Social Choice with Analytic Preferences”

We characterize the class of Arrovian Social Welfare Functions as integer solutions to a collection of linear inequalities. Many of the known results about impossibility, Arrovian Social Welfare Functions, properties of the majority rule etc., can be derived in a simple and unified way from this integer program. We characterize those preference domains that admit a non-dictatorial, neutral Arro...

Food choice is influenced by a large number of factors, including social and cultural factors. One method for trying to understand the impact of these factors is through the study of attitudes. Research is described which utilizes social psychological attitude models of attitude-behaviour relationships, in particular the Theory of Planned Behaviour. This approach has shown good prediction of be...

To be pertinent to democratic practice, collective choice functions need not apply to all possible constellations of individual preference, but only to those that are "humanly possible" in an appropriate sense. The present paper develops a theory of humanly possible preference within the context of the mathematical theory of learning. The theory of preference is then exploited in an attempt to ...

In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical. How then can we design a mechanism preferably decentralized, simple, scalable, and not requiri...