Social choice procedures in water-resource management

Social choice procedures are introduced and applied to solve a special wafer-resources management problem of Northern Arizona. The methods include plurality voting the Borda count, the Hare system, pairwise voting and dictatorship. These procedures are applicable in all cases when several alternatives are simultaneously ranked by different decision makers, or decision making groups or with respect to conflicting criteria. Since no quantification of the criteria is needed, these methods have special importance if criteria cannot be easily quantified, objective function values are hard to get or they are very uncertain. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.