A Brief History of Social Choice

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• 研討會日期 : 2012-03-13
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Maurice Salles
• 地點 : Conference Room B110
• 演講者簡介 : Maurice Salles received his Ph.D. in Economics from Université de Caen in 1974. He is currently serving as Professor of Economics at Université de Caen/Basse-Normandie. His research field is in economic justice, economic theory, economics, ethics, game theory, logic, mathematical economics, mathematics, microeconomics, and political economy.
• 演講摘要 : Social choice in its modern guise is a young subject that can be dated back to the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s in the works of Black (1948), Arrow (1950, 1951) and Guilbaud (1952). This is nowadays considered as a rebirth, the (first) birth being generally attributed to Borda (1784) and Condorcet (1785). However, as will be clear in this Chapter, one can find a number of precursors. Social choice is concerned with the selection of options on the basis of the opinions of individuals over these options. It should be noted that there is an analogy with the choice by an individual of, say, an object, in the presence of multiple criteria. However, I will restrict myself to the multi‐individual framework. The selection procedures have been studied either from a rather abstract point of view or from a more practical point of view. In the former case, one considers notions such as aggregation functions, social choice functions and their properties and in the latter case one considers voting rules, voting games etc. It is interesting to note, in particular in this handbook perspective, that this dichotomy has a historical origin, the abstract aspect being generally associated with the utilitarianism tradition from Bentham to Bergson, Samuelson and with welfare economics and the practical aspect being associated with questions related to elections, be it elections in small committees or in larger organizations. The precursors (I will use this phrase for authors living before the 18th century) dealt mostly with voting. On the other hand, the 18th century saw an upsurge of interests under both aspects, in particular with scholars living at the same time: Bentham on one side, and Borda and Condorcet on the other side. It is surprising that during the 19th century the interest in voting rather faded away in spite of the emergence of democratic societies. There has been, however, some work on proportional representation (or the equivalent apportionment methods) by European scholars rediscovering for a part what some founding fathers of American democracy previously did and the brilliant exception of C.L. Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll. The rebirth of social choice theory in the 20th century offers the same dichotomy. Although both Duncan Black and Kenneth Arrow are economists, the former obviously belongs to the voting tradition and the latter to the welfare economics tradition. Even though voting aspects are not absent in the founding book by Arrow, book entitled “Social choice and individual values ”, a significant part of this book is devoted to discussions of the compensation tests debate between Hicks, Kaldor and Scitovsky and of the Bergson‐Samuelson social welfare functions. “Modern” (must I say Arrovian?) social choice theory has to be presented even in a handbook devoted to the history of economic thought. I will refrain from describing the most recent aspects. However, a large part of this Chapter will be devoted to Arrow’s theorem and its descendants and to other major results that form the cornerstone of the domain.