Social Choice: A Dynamical Consensus Model

The main conclusion of more than 50 years of evolution of the theory of social choice (Mueller, 2000) is as follows: in the world constructed according to Arrow’s model of social choice only different forms of collective oppression can exist. Weale (Theory of Choice, 1992) gives the following vision of an alternative model of social choice: "An alternative model of collective choice would be most likely to present it not as a process of preference aggregation, in which there is a mapping from a set of individual orderings to a social ordering, but as a process of dialog in which reasons are exchanged between participants in a process that is perceived to be a joint search for a consensus".

In this report I aim at construction of this alternative model of social choice based on the value-powered exchange of economic or symbolic goods. I demonstrate below that under some natural hypotheses about individual demand and supply functions of goods, the social consensus is possible, i.e. there exist stable stationary points in multivariate systems of social exchange of economic or symbolic goods. These stable stationary points are interpreted as the social consensus points in dialogic (or poly-logic) processes of social choice.