Collective Decision Making

One of the main challenges facing contemporary society is to understand how people can make decisions together. Understanding Collective Decision Making builds on evolutionary theories and presents an analytical tool to analyse and visualise collective decision making. By combining theoretical research with real world case studies, the authors provide a coherent and conclusive solution to the often fragmented and dispersed literature on the subject.

Harrie de Swart is a Dutch logician and mathematician with a great and open int- est in applications of logic. After being confronted with Arrow’s Theorem, Harrie became very interested in social choice theory. In 1986 he took the initiative to start up a group of Dutch scientists for the study of social choice theory. This initiative grew out to a research group and a series of colloquia, which were held approximately every month at the University of Tilburg in The Netherlands. The organization of the colloquia was in the hands of Harrie and under his guidance they became more and more internationally known. Many international scholars liked visiting the social choice colloquia in Tilburg and enjoyed giving one or more presentations about their work. They liked Harrie’s kindness and hospitality, and the openness of the group for anything and everything in the eld of social choice. The Social Choice Theory Group started up by Harrie consisted, and still c- sists, of scholars from several disciplines; mostly economics, mathematics, and (mathematical) psychology. It was set up for the study of and discussion about anything that had to do with social choice theory including, and not in the least, the supervision of PhD students in the theory. Members of the group were, among o- ers, Thom Bezembinder (psychologist), Hans Peters (mathematician), Pieter Ruys (economist), Stef Tijs (mathematician and game theorist) and, of course, Harrie de Swart (logician and mathematician).

The Origins of Collective Decision Making, identifies three paradigms of collective decision making – Counsel, Majority and Consensus, and discovers their origins in traditional, medieval and modern times, and traces their evolution over centuries up to the current juncture.

This study is a result of three continuous years of fieldwork in a hamlet in rural Japan. The data presented and analyzed here consist of records from participant observation, formal and informal interviews, casual conversation and formal questionnaires, and public and private documents. The subject of this research is group decision making, and the results of this process are, after all, a matter of public record. The major conclusions of this study are outlined in their simplest and most straightforward form. A hamlet is fundamentally a nexus for the organization of productive exchange among member households, the form of exchange through which two or more parties actively combine their resources to produce something of value not available, or as cheaply available, to any of them separately. Defection from productive exchange agreements by hamlet members is reduced by making access to future valuable transactions and corporate property contingent upon the integrity of each current exchange transaction. This method of combining a common interest in production with contingent access to productive resources is termed mutual investment and is the major source of consensus in hamlet decision making. When only cooperate resources are at issue, decisions regularly result in unanimity. When a course of action can be implemented only if hamlet members relinquish control over individually held resources, a division will emerge among the membership. Whether or not a formal vote is taken, the distribution of differing opinion will be known through more informal means of communication. In all cases of division, by the time the course of action to be implemented is formally announced, the minority in opposition will be extremely small. The question then must be resolved whether those in the minority will participate in the implementation or resign as hamlet members. This book is written with two rather disparate audiences in mind: readers interested primarily in exchange and decision-making phenomenon, on the one hand, and readers interested primarily in the unity of experience represented by the Japanese sensibility, on the other.

First Published in 2011.This is Volume 11 of fourteen in the library collection of Policy and Government and looks at the applications from public choice theory on decision making. It brings together proceedings that look seek to answer the question for the forum, which was whether public choice theory offers promise of providing a firmer foundation for applied institutional research and for institutional innovations which could contribute to the solution of some of these problems.

First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

When one thinks about how collective decisions are made, voting is the method that comes naturally to mind. But other methods such as random process and consensus are also used. This book explores just what a collective decision is, classifies the methods of making collective decisions, and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Classification is the prelude to evaluation. What are the characteristics of a method of making collective decisions, the book asks, that permit us to describe a collective decision as good? The second part of the book is detailed exploration of voting: the dimensions in which voting situations differ, the origins and logic of majority rule, the frequency of cycles in voting, the Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorems, criteria for ways of cutting through cycles and the application of these criteria to a variety of rules, voting over continuums, proportional representation, and voting rules that take account of intensities of preferences. Relatively unknown methods of voting give voting a much greater potential than is generally recognized. Collective Decisions and Voting is essential reading for everyone with an interest in voting theory and in how public choices might be made.

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