On the Symmetry Approach to the Committee Decision Problem

Abstract

The order of discussion is as follows. In Section 2 the basic ideas (which are already “classical”) are briefly restated and the problem is formulated. In Section 3 some proposals are made for the weights of the linear combination of individual preference functions. Section 4 illustrates the committee decision problem by a very simple example of measures of central tendency, the solution of which suggests a method for solving the general problem. Section 5 is the heart of the article; it introduces the symmetry condition. The last section deals with the case when symmetry cannot be realized.