Arrow and the Problem of Social Choice

According to Kenneth Arrow, ‘the problem of social choice is the aggregation of the multiplicity of individual preference scales about alternative social actions’ (Arrow 1967, p. 12). Numerous problems, different from each other in many important respects, fit into this general characterization. The voluminous literature on the preference aggregation problems has extensively utilized the uniform and abstract framework of the axiomatic social choice theory (basically due to Arrow’s (1951) seminal work) for analysing these essentially different problems. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.