Reality-Aware Social Choice

TL;DR

This paper introduces Reality-Aware Social Choice, a new framework that explicitly incorporates the default social state into voting and ranking processes, enabling more consistent and cycle-breaking decision rules.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive theory of Reality-Aware Social Choice, including axioms, voting rules, and applications, filling a gap in traditional social choice models.

Findings

Reality can break Condorcet cycles effectively.

New Reality-aware voting rules satisfy specific axioms.

The framework has practical applications in decision-making processes.

Abstract

Social Choice theory generalizes voting on one proposal to ranking multiple proposals. Yet, while a vote on a single proposal has the status quo (Reality) as a default, Reality has been forsaken during this generalization. Here, we propose to restore this default social state and to incorporate Reality explicitly into Social Choice. We show that doing so gives rise to a new theory, complete with its domain restrictions, voting rules with their Reality-aware axiomatic properties, and certain game-theoretic aspects. In particular, we show how Reality can be used in a principled way to break Condorcet cycles and develop an efficient Reality-aware Condorcet-consistent agenda. We then discuss several applications of Reality-Aware Social Choice.