Social choice theory
Academic discipline / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
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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]