This research is to address the well known problems of social choice in environments more realistic than those normally considered. In particular, the researcher will alter the requirements of universal domain, binary-ness, and transitivity commonly assumed in work on social choice. These requirements are among the most basic for researchers working within the general framework established by Kenneth Arrow in 1951. This study will adopt choice axioms shaped by the exigencies for real world computation and develop algorithms generating a member of the set of best outcomes to allow for more latitude in the choice of a computational procedure. This is because society may wish to sacrifice some computational efficiency to open the door to a social choice rule that has more desirable ethical properties than a more efficient algorithm would permit. The goal is to examine the possibility of defining an efficient, nonbinary, social choice correspondence that can be used to settle the kinds of distributional welfare questions that typically confronted economists. This important study represents a move toward greater realism in the basic models, and permits a much better fit between social choice theory and standard economic models.
