ABSTRACT
The problem of amalgamating preferences into a social or group choice is a very general one and subsumes many different phenomena: some that have conventionally been considered political, some economic, and some that are considered sociological or social psychological. The papers of the previous sections dealt with topics such as power, coalition formation, and level of aspiration. The five papers of this section deal with normative questions— how one should appropriately or effectively merge preferences. Interestingly, all the papers of the section deal with some aspect of behavior that we conventionally call political. And it is not surprising, for the practice and study of politics, if it can be characterized singularly at all, may be said to be the practice and study of the amalgamation of preferences into a social choice.
