Intensity of preference, also known as intensity preference, is a term popularized by the work of the economist
Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (23 August 1921 – 21 February 2017) was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. He was the joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972.
In economi ...
, who was a co-recipient of the
1972 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. This term is used in reference to models for aggregating ordinal rankings.
This term is used in
economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics anal ...
,
politics
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...
,
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
,
management science
Management science (or managerial science) is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is ...
and other areas in which methods to derive the consensus ranking are developed.
In an analysis of voting, for example, the intensity of preference is a measure of an individual voter's (or group of voters') willingness to incur the costs or inconvenience of the act of officially registering a preferential choice at the time and place required, not the vote itself.
[Arrow, Kenneth J. (1963). ]
Social choices
The "intensity" of preference can be a factor in aggregating individual choices into social choices.
[Tulane University]
"Proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem,"
citing J. Kelly, ''Social Choice Theory: An Introduction''
:Independence of irrelevant alternatives "... does not rule out "intensity" of preference in making social choices.
:(1) "It is part of our definition of a social choice rule/function that the choices are based only on the information in a profile of ordinal preference relations.
:(2) "These preference relations do not contain any intensity information that could be used by social choice rules, whether or not they violate the independence axiom."
See also
*
Arrow's impossibility theorem
Arrow's impossibility theorem, the general possibility theorem or Arrow's paradox is an impossibility theorem in social choice theory that states that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), no ranked voting electoral syst ...
*
Majority rule
Majority rule is a principle that means the decision-making power belongs to the group that has the most members. In politics, majority rule requires the deciding vote to have majority, that is, more than half the votes. It is the binary deci ...
*
Storable voting
Notes
References
* Arrow, Kenneth J. (1951). ''Social Choice and Individual Values.'' New York: John Wiley
OCLC 469063398
* Kelly, Jerry S. (1987). ''Social Choice Theory: An Introduction.'' Berlin : Springer-Verlag.
OCLC 475917883
External links
Intensity Measures of Consumer Preferences
Economics theorems
Voting theory
Social choice theory
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