Social choice theory
Academic discipline / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Social choice theory?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
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]
This article has an unclear citation style. (April 2021) |
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]