Abstract
Voting is a common group decision technique to select one candidate, who might be an individual, option, or project. Voting can also be used when the objective is to select not one candidate, but several. However, new issues arise when the purpose of voting is to choose several candidates; prominent among them is avoidance of “tyranny of the majority,” wherein a voting bloc controls more than its share of the choices. A good voting procedure should strike an appropriate balance between the requirement that each selected candidate has strong support among the voters and the requirement that the set of selected candidates is broadly supported within the set of all voters. Multi-winner voting is often the most efficient way to make group decisions. Single-winner voting procedures can be used for this purpose, but they are generally not recommended because they ignore the issue of individual versus group support. Procedures that have been proposed for group decisions to select a predetermined number of candidates are described and illustrated, and their properties as voting procedures discussed. Multi-winner voting can make it easier for a group to choose a set of candidates, options, or projects, but care must be taken to ensure that the choices are appropriate, fair, and balanced.
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Kilgour, D.M. (2020). Group Decisions: Choosing Multiple Winners by Voting. In: Kilgour, D.M., Eden, C. (eds) Handbook of Group Decision and Negotiation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12051-1_49-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12051-1_49-1
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