Disposing Dictators, Demystifying Voting Paradoxes: Social Choice Analysis

We decide by elections, but do we elect who the voters really want? The answer, as we have learned over the last two centuries, is "not necessarily." What a negative, frightening assertion about a principal tool of democracy! This negativism has been supported by two hundred years of published results showing how bad the situation can be. This expository, largely non-technical book is the first to find positive results showing that the situation is not anywhere as dire and negative as we have been led to believe. Instead there are surprisingly simple explanations for the negative assertions, and positive conclusions can be obtained.

Author: Donald G. Saari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 08/25/2008
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780521731607

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 10/24/2008 pg. 21

About the Author
Saari, Donald G.: - Donald G. Saari is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and Honorary Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California-Irvine, where he is Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. He previously served on the faculty of Northwestern University from 1968 to 2000, where he held the Pancoe Professorship of Mathematics. A Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Saari is the former Chief Editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The author of more than 170 published papers, he has also written numerous books, including Basic Geometry of Voting (1995), Decisions and Elections: Explaining the Unexpected (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting (2001), The Way It Was: Mathematics from the Early Years of the Bulletin (2003), and Collisions, Rings, and Other Newtonian N-Body Problems (2005).