Social Choice on Networks

A social network comprises a collective of individuals who exert influence on each other via explicit communication/control linkages. Applying social choice theory to networks requires the influence linkages to be explicitly embedded into the social choice model. Embedding is accomplished by replacing classical categorical preferences with conditional preferences that enable individuals to express material benefit in a social context. The result is a new concept of aggregation that produces a coherent coordination utility that provides a comprehensive model of the emergent social structure and enables the generation of coordinated solution concepts.