Social choice theory
Academic discipline / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Social choice theory is the branch of welfare economics which studies processes of collective decision-making.[1] It contrasts with political science in that it is a normative science studying how societies should make decisions, whereas political science is descriptive (observing how societies do make decisions). Social choice incorporates insights from economics, mathematics, philosophy, and game theory to find the best ways to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole, called a social welfare function.[2][3]
This article has an unclear citation style. (April 2021) |
Because of its strong connections to political philosophy and voting, social choice is sometimes also called voting theory.[4][5][6] 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] The field is closely tied to mechanism design, which can be thought of as the modelling of social choice using game theory.
Social choice differs from decision theory in that the latter is concerned with how individuals, rather than societies, can make rational decisions.