Social Choice

Roles: voter, preference, ranking, aggregation, criterion, outcome, impossibility, trade-off

The study of how individual preferences are aggregated into collective decisions. As a target domain, social choice absorbs impossibility results and trade-off structures from mathematical logic. The frame foregrounds the gap between individual rationality and collective coherence: what seems reasonable for each person may be impossible for the group. Its metaphorical power lies in formalizing the intuition that no system of collective decision can be simultaneously fair, consistent, and non-dictatorial.