ABSTRACT
The background of committee decision-making theory is in voting paradoxes, the first of which were discovered more than 200 years ago during the years preceding the French revolution of 1789. We discuss these as well as some other voting paradoxes of more recent origin.40 We also outline two basic intuitions of what characterizes collectively best decisions. Many important results in the committee decision-making theory are of negative nature. They amount to showing incompatibilities between various desiderata one would intuitively like to associate with choice rules. Let us, however, begin with some basic concepts.
