Multi-issue voting

Article summary

Multi-issue voting is a setting in which several issues have to be decided by voting. Multi-issue voting raises several considerations, that are not relevant in single-issue voting. The first consideration is attaining fairness both for the majority and for minorities. To illustrate, consider a group of friends who decide each evening whether to go to a movie or a restaurant. Suppose that 60% of the friends prefer movies and 40% prefer restaurants. In a one-time vote, the group will probably accept the majority preference and go to a movie. However, making the same decision again and again each day is unfair, since it satisfies 60% of the friends 100% of the time, while the other 40% are never satisfied. Considering this problem as multi-issue voting allows attain a fair sequence of decisions by going 60% of the evenings to a movie and 40% of the evenings to a restaurant. The study of fair multi-issue voting mechanisms is sometimes called fair public decision making. The special case in which the different issues are decisions in different time-periods, and the number of time-periods is not known in advance, is called perpetual voting. The second consideration is the potential dependence between the different issues. For example, suppose the issues are two suggestions for funding public projects.…

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