Intensity of preference

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Intensity of preference, also known as intensity preference, [1] is a term popularized by the work of the economist Kenneth Arrow, who was a co-recipient of the 1972 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. This term is used in reference to models for aggregating ordinal rankings.

Kenneth Arrow American economist

Kenneth Joseph "Ken" Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.

Contents

This term is used in economics, politics, marketing, management science and other areas in which methods to derive the consensus ranking are developed. [2]

Economics Social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services

Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.

Politics refers to a set of activities associated with the governance of a country, or an area. It involves making decisions that apply to members of a group.

Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. Marketing is the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers. With its focus on the customer, marketing is one of the premier components of business management.

In an analysis of voting, for example, the intensity of preference is a measure of an individual voter's (or group of voters') willingness to incur the costs or inconvenience of the act of officially registering a preferential choice at the time and place required, not the vote itself. [3]

Social choices

The "intensity" of preference can be a factor in aggregating individual choices into social choices. [4]

Independence of irrelevant alternatives "... does not rule out "intensity" of preference in making social choices.
(1) "It is part of our definition of a social choice rule/function that the choices are based only on the information in a profile of ordinal preference relations.
(2) "These preference relations do not contain any intensity information that could be used by social choice rules, whether or not they violate the independence axiom." [4]

See also

In social choice theory, Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem stating that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. The theorem is often cited in discussions of voting theory as it is further interpreted by the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem. The theorem is named after economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his doctoral thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The original paper was titled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare".

Majority rule is a decision rule that selects alternatives which have a majority, that is, more than half the votes. It is the binary decision rule used most often in influential decision-making bodies, including all the legislatures of democratic nations.

Notes

  1. ↑ Harvey, Charles M. "Aggregation of individuals' preference intensities into social preference intensity," Social Choice and Welfare, January 1999, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp 65-79; retrieved 2012-12-12.
  2. ↑ Cook, Wade D. and Moshe Kress, "Ordinal Ranking with Intensity of Preference," Management Science (US), Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan., 1985), pp. 26-32.
  3. ↑ Arrow, Kenneth J. (1963). Social Choice and Individual Values, p. 114. , p. 114, at Google Books
  4. 1 2 Tulane University: "Proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem," citing J. Kelly, Social Choice Theory: An Introduction

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References

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