This page collects work by Mark C. Wilson and coauthors on social choice theory, which I interpret to mean "collective decision-making without monetary transfers". This area includes topics such as single-winner voting rules and allocation (fair division) of resources. The motivation is to find "better" methods for making such decisions. Unlike many authors, I interpret "better" in terms of social welfare outcomes under "realistic" preferences. If we are to focus on axiomatic criteria, then rather than strategyproofness and Pareto efficiency I prefer to consider ideas of fairness. I believe that the space of good mechanisms is large and mostly unexplored, and focusing prematurely on extreme points of the space is misguided. The 2019 paper in Frontiers of Economic Design (listed below) gives a good explanation of my thinking. The space of voting rules is vast, and there is little reason to suspect that we have found all the good ones. Some papers here explore this space in more detail.

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Last updated: 2019-11-10.