[EM] Good references on voting theory

[Rémi]

Disclaimer: I am quite sorry that my e-mail does not really fit the aims of this mailing list, but I found no other solution to contact specialists of voting theory...

Hi everyone,

I am a French researcher in mathematics (rather a specialist of probability actually); I have decided to write a popularization paper on the mathematical aspects of voting theory, as a contribution to a French website called Images des Mathématiques (http://images.math.cnrs.fr/), which website is devoted to popularization of (contemporary) mathematical research. My aim is to explain the main problematics linked to voting theory, with a stress on the mathematical (or game-theoretical) aspects of this theory. After an introduction dealing with the general aims of voting and the ambiguousness of the concept of collective choice, my article would explain the main criteria desirable for devising a voting system, state some great impossibility results, and finally compare some particular voting systems. Among other things, I would like to handle the (linked) questions of strategic voting and probabilistic voting systems. My article would remain focused on the single-winner problem and would contain no discussion at all on the practical aspects of designing a voting protocol.

Of course, I have found much valuable information on these topics over the Internet (just the Wikipedia "voting system" page is quite remarkable), and certainly I already have the material to write some good and rather complete article. However, I would also like to get a good reference on the topic, typically a (not-too-old?) book written by a researcher, with the triple goal of (i) getting more complete, better-organized information, (ii) giving greater authority to my article by quoting a book rather than just Wikipedia or other webpages, and (iii) suggesting a good reading for those readers of my future article who would like to go further. The problem is, I have found several titles of such books, but I have no idea of which ones are better-written, more complete, better fitted to my goals, more "classical" or easier to find...

This is why I am asking you which references you would advise to me as the main source for my future article (obviously I will not be able to  or even read all of them, so I have to make a choice...). Hoping for your kind answers!


Sincerely yours,

Rémi Peyre
Assistant Professor, École des Mines de Nancy (France)
remi.peyre at iecn.u-nancy.fr
http://www.normalesup.org/~rpeyre/pro/index-en.html

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