Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections, to the theory of social choice in distributive environments, and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision-making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods, from game-theoretic analysis, to empirical investigation, to experimental testing.

This Handbook provides an overview of interdisciplinary research related to social choice and voting that is intended for a broad audience. Expert contributors from various fields present critical summaries of the existing literature, including intuitive explanations of technical terminology and well-known theorems, suggesting new directions for research.

This book grew out of the conviction that the preparation and management of large-scale technological projects can be substantially improved. We have witnessed the often unhappy course of societal and political decision making concerning projects such as hazardous chemical installations, novel types of electric power plant or storage sites for solid wastes. This has led us to believe that probabilistic risk analysis, technical reliability analysis and environm,ental impact analysis are necessary but insufficient for making acceptable, and justifiable, social decisions about such projects. There is more to socio-technical decision making than applying acceptance rules based on neglige ably low accident probabilities or on maximum credible accidents. Consideration must also be given to psychological, social and political issues and methods of decision making. Our conviction initially gave rise to an international experts' workshop titled 'Social decision methodology for technological projects' (SDMTP) and held in May 1986 at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, at a time when Cvetkovich spent a sabbatical there. The work shop - aimed at surveying the issues and listing the methods to address them - was the first part of an effort whose second part was directed at the production of this volume. Plans called for the book to deal systematically with the main problems of socio-technical decision making; it was to list a number of useful approaches and methods; and it was to present a number of integrative conclusions and recommendations for both policy makers and methodologists.

This book integrates two different but equally prominent themes in the management field: mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). It explores questions such as whether strategic goals overlap or conflict with sustainability choices, what the strategic and sustainability tensions are confronting expanding companies, and whether these companies can grow and be socially responsible for a variety of stakeholders. The authors provide a fresh perspective on the study of acquisitions, aiming to inspire the M&A field and using examples from different global and institutional contexts in both developed and developing economies. This ground-breaking book addresses the gap that has existed between acquisitions on the one hand and social responsibility and sustainability on the other, for an integrative perspective on enacting M&As and achieving the triple people-planet-profits bottom line.

This book constitutes the conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory, ADT 2021, held in Toulouse, France, in November 2021. The 27 full papers presented were carefully selected from 58 submissions. The papers focus on algorithmic decision theory broadly defined, seeking to bring together researchers and practitioners coming from diverse areas of computer science, economics and operations research in order to improve the theory and practice of modern decision support.

This book offers a comprehensive overview and critique of the most important political and philosophical interpretations of the basic results of social choice, assessing their plausibility and seeking to identify the links between the theory of social choice and the more traditional issues of political theory and philosophy. In this regard, the author eschews a strong methodological commitment or technical formalism; the approach is instead based on the presentation of political facts and illustrated via numerous real-life examples. This allows the reader to get acquainted with the philosophical and political dispute surrounding voting and collective decision-making and its links to social choice theory.

Advanced Textbooks in Economics, Volume 18: The Strategy of Social Choice focuses on the social, economics, and political implications of social choice. The publication first surveys introduction, social choice functions and correspondences, and monotonicity and the arrow theorem. Discussions focus on efficiency, anonymity and neutrality, classifying voting methods, normative versus positive approach to voting, voting and the non-strategic theory of social choice, and development of the strategic theory of voting. The text then ponders on strategy-proofness and monotonicity and sophisticated voting. Topics include sophisticated implementation, voting by binary choices, strategy-proof social choice functions and game forms, Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, and restricted domains. The manuscript examines cooperative voting and voting by veto, including the minority principle, proportional veto core, voting by integer veto, effectivity functions, maximal and stable effectivity functions, and implementation by Nash equilibrium. The text is a dependable source of data for researchers interested in the process of social choice.

Using the economic approach of social choice theory, this unique book examines difficulties found in democratic processes involved in the creation and implementation of planning policies. Social choice theory focuses on the hard trade-offs to be made between rationality in decision-making on the one hand, and political values such as democracy, liberalism and freedom from manipulation on the other. As an institution can be seen as a set of rules, the focus on rules and procedures of collective choice makes social choice theory well suited for analysing important political aspects of planning institutions. Special attention is given to communicative planning and the logical reasons why all the desirable properties of dialogue cannot be simultaneously attained. The analysis provides original and significant new insights into the process and the institutions involved. It highlights weak spots of present planning techniques and procedures and suggests further steps towards institutionally enriched planning theory.

This second part of a two-volume set continues to describe economists' efforts to quantify the social decisions people necessarily make and the philosophies that those choices define. Contributors draw on lessons from philosophy, history, and other disciplines, but they ultimately use editor Kenneth Arrow's seminal work on social choice as a jumping-off point for discussing ways to incentivize, punish, and distribute goods. - Develops many subjects from Volume 1 (2002) while introducing new themes in welfare economics and social choice theory - Features four sections: Foundations, Developments of the Basic Arrovian Schemes, Fairness and Rights, and Voting and Manipulation - Appeals to readers who seek introductions to writings on human well-being and collective decision-making - Presents a spectrum of material, from initial insights and basic functions to important variations on basic schemes

Since World War II the subject of social choice has grown in many and surprising ways. The impossibility theorems have suggested many directions: mathematical characterisations of voting structures satisfying various sets of conditions, the consequences of restricting choice to certain domaines, the relation to competitive equilibrium and the core, and trade-offs among the partial satisfactions of some conditions. The links with classical and modern theories of justice and, in particular, the competing ideas of rights and utilitarianism have shown the power of formal social choice analysis in illuminating the most basic philosophical arguments about the good social life. Finally, the ideals of the just society meet with the play of self interest; social choice mechanisms can lend themselves to manipulation, and the analysis of conditions under which given ideals can be realised under self interest is a political parallel to the welfare economics of the market. The contributors to these volumes focus on these issues at the forefront of current research.