Social Choice and Individual Values

By Kenneth J. Arrow. 1951

Originally published in 1951, Social Choice and Individual Values introduced "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" and founded the field of social choice theory in economics and political science. This new edition, including a new foreword by Nobel laureate Eric Maskin, reintroduces Arrow's seminal book to a new generation of students and researchers. "Far beyond a classic, this small book unleashed the ongoing explosion of interest in social choice and voting theory. A half-century later, the book remains full of profound insight: its central message, 'Arrow's Theorem,' has changed the way we think."-Donald G. Saari, author of Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected

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Citations in the corpus

A survey of top-k query processing techniques in relational database systems (2008, methodology): “Other possible summaries include histograms [Babcock et al. 2003; Chaudhuri et al. 1998] and wavelets Chakrabarti et al. [2001]. Approximation based on sampling has inherent problems that negatively effect the accuracy in many cases.”
‘Social Sharedness’ as a Unifying Theme for Information Processing in Groups (2000, background): “Social choice theorists (e.g. Arrow, 1963; Black, 1958) devised models of how these preferences should be aggregated in order to produce optimal group outcomes.”
How not to measure the efficiency of public services (and how one might) (2002, background): “The reluctance to engage in the thorny issue of multiperson preferences may have been reinforced by the famous ‘impossibility theorem’ of Arrow (1951)—the apparently unattractive finding that, roughly speaking, dictatorship was the only option for social choice satisfying some simple axioms.”
Rank ordering engineering designs: pairwise comparison charts and Borda counts (2002, methodology): “Arrow’s theorem has been stated in many ways, as we note in the footnotes that accompany our own statement (see Arrow 1951; Scott and Antonsson 1999).”
The doctrinal paradox, the discursive dilemma, and logical aggregation theory (2012, background): “In still a different framework, Nehring (2003) derives a version of Arrow’s theorem for weak preferences that involves a monotonic addition to independence of irrelevant alternatives. (34)Such as those described by Gaertner (2006) and Le Breton and Weymark (2011).”
Board Diversity, Firm Risk, and Corporate Policies (2017, unknown): “This would make the attainment of consensus harder and the resulting outcomes more erratic (Arrow, 1951).”
Stochastic multi-attribute acceptability analysis (SMAA): an application to the ranking of Italian regions (2018, background): “Nardo et al. (2008) suggest that, in the spirit of the well-known impossibility Arrow theorem (Arrow, 1951), there does not exist any perfect aggregation rule.”