Solving the social choice problem under equality constraints

Abstract

In a context where a decision has to be taken collectively by several agents, the social choice problem consists in deciding whether there exists a socially acceptable rule that aggregates the individual preferences of the agents into a social one. We analyze this problem for sets of alternatives defined by equality constraints and obtain a solution that, in sharp contrast to the classical ones, is expressed in an elementary language and ultimately reduces the social choice problem to a standard constrained optimization problem. By considering a toy example we shall be able to interpret this general result in terms of the rationality (in the sense of Economics) of the design of the set of alternatives rather than, surprisingly, that of the agents involved in the actual social choice problem.