Mathematics of Social Choice. Voting, Compensation, and Division
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Author(s): C. Börgers
Publisher: SIAM
ISBN: 9780898716955
Format: softback
245pp
Price: $35.00
Review Date: 30 July 2010
Review: This book covers election systems and fair division of resources. It is aimed at people with little or no background in mathematics: none of the material requires a knowledge beyond elementary algebra. The text is divided into three parts. Part I looks at voting methods for selecting a single winning candidate. The options are narrowed down until a single preferred method is found, Schulze’s beatpath method. Part II examines compensation problems where an indivisible item has to be assigned to one of several people who are equally entitled to ownership, with monetary compensation paid to others. Part III discusses the cake-cutting problem of sharing a divisible resource between several people. There are also appendices on set notation, logic, and mathematical induction.