Social Choice and Individual Values
Kenneth Arrow's monograph Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 2nd ed., 1963) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor. Somewhat formally, the "social choice" in the title refers to Arrow's representation of how social values from the set of individual orderings would be implemented under the constitution. Less formally, each social choice corresponds to the feasible set of laws passed by a "vote" (the set of orderings) under the constitution even if not every individual voted in favor of all the laws.
The work culminated in what Arrow called the "General Possibility Theorem," better known thereafter as Arrow's (impossibility) theorem.
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