Aggregation of Continuous Preferences in One Dimension

Alberto Del Pia, Dusan Knop, Alexandra Lassota, Krzysztof Sornat, Nimrod Talmon

Abstract: We develop a general, formal model of social choice in which voters have continuous preferences over a one-dimensional space. Our model is parameterized by different restrictions that we introduce regarding the way voter preferences change in time as well as the optimization criteria (that correspond to a normative continuum of fairness definitions) desired from an aggregation method---that outputs a continuous, one-dimensional curve---given such inputs. We discuss the applicability of the model to different real-world situations and, as a first step towards an analysis of the different model realizations, we concentrate on identifying those cases that are computationally feasible to compute.