The study of collective preference and choice involves exposure to a number of interesting and challenging problems. Clarifying these problems and their significance is the main objective of this book.

The problems of collective decision making arise in the standard social choice setting, where individuals differ in their preferences. They also occur in the standard team or committee decision-making setting, where individuals share the same preferences, but differ in their decisional capabilities in an uncertain environment. The issues of collective preference and choice are relevant and of significance to many disciplines in the social sciences.

The term “social preference” relates to the description of the system of tastes or preferences of society. The term “social choice” relates to behavior; that is, the selection of one of the feasible actions or alternatives faced by society. The book presents the classical aggregation problems of (i) social choice theory, (ii) voting theory and (iii) group decision making under uncertainty, and discusses their implications.

The social choice problem is clarified by Arrow's impossibility theorem, Sen's paretian liberal paradox and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility theorem. The basic problems of voting theory are examined by focusing on Condorcet's voting paradox and on the comparison between the voting rules proposed by Condorcet, Dodgson and Borda. The problem of judgment aggregation is studied using the framework of Condorcet's jury theorem.

The book also presents three more recent approaches to the resolution of the problems in these three fields.