A Mathematical Foundation for Voting and Decision Rules

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

A Mathematical Foundation for Voting and Decision Rules Abstract of Proposed Research Donald G. Saari This research is to study the possible results of using different decision and voting rules in political and business decision making. We are interested in understanding possible conflicts in the results obtained by using different rules. The results may have considerable impact in many different areas ranging from political science to design criteria in engineering. This project is to develop new methodologies for anticipating the results of particular voting rules when the underlying voter preferences have certain structures. This will be done by studying the possible structures of the data. Coordinate systems for the space of individual preferences will be developed. Then the different conclusions associated with applying different rules to this data will be investigated and classified.