Social choice theory
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Social choice theory or social choice is a branch of economics that analyzes mechanisms and procedures for collective decisions.[1] Social choice incorporates insights from welfare economics, mathematics, and political science to find the best ways to combine individual opinions, preferences, or beliefs into a single coherent measure of well-being.
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Whereas decision theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with how to translate the preferences of individuals into the preferences of a group. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Another example is voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences.[2]
It is methodologically individualistic, in that it aggregates preferences and behaviors of individual members of society. Using elements of formal logic for generality, analysis proceeds from a set of seemingly reasonable axioms of social choice to form a social welfare function (or constitution).[3]