eprintid: 4183 rev_number: 20 eprint_status: archive userid: 351 dir: disk0/00/00/41/83 datestamp: 2016-01-15 02:04:41 lastmod: 2021-08-27 17:14:56 status_changed: 2016-01-15 02:04:41 type: monograph metadata_visibility: show item_issues_count: 2 creators_name: Young, H.P. creators_id: AL1397 title: Optimal Group Decisions ispublished: pub internal_subjects: iis_met internal_subjects: iis_neg divisions: prog_ins abstract: Consider a group of individuals who must rank a set of decisions or choices. If the members of the group disagree, how should their opinions be reconciled into a group ordering? Historically we may discern two ways of answering this question. The "relativist" approach, which is the dominant one in the modern social choice literature, holds that differences of opinion arise largely from differences in preferences or values. Hence the objective should be to strike a fair compromise between differences of opinion. The "rationalist" approach, which was an article of faith among the eighteenth-century founders of voting theory, holds that differences of opinion arise from misperceptions about the true merit of different decisions. For them the goal was to find the ordering that is most likely to be "correct" or "true". These two positions are not incompatible. Under suitable conditions, in fact, they yield the same method, which was first proposed in a rudimentary form by Condorcet. We show that it can be characterized by a slight weakening of the independence of irrelevant alternative condition. date: 1994-04 date_type: published publisher: WP-94-026 iiasapubid: WP-94-026 price: 10 creators_browse_id: 2539 full_text_status: public monograph_type: working_paper place_of_pub: IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria coversheets_dirty: FALSE fp7_type: info:eu-repo/semantics/book citation: Young, H.P. (1994). Optimal Group Decisions. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-94-026 document_url: https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4183/1/WP-94-026.pdf