A Survey on Models and Methods for Preference Voting and Aggregation

A key issue in the preferential voting framework is how voters express their preferences on a set of candidates. In the existing voting systems, each voter selects a subset of candidates and ranks them from most to least preferred. The obtained preference score of each candidate is the weighted sum of votes receives in different places. Thus, one of the most important issues for aggregating preferences rankings is the determination of the weights associated with the different ranking places. To avoid the subjectivity in determining the weights, various models based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) have been appeared in the literature to determine the most favorable weights for each candidate. This work presents a survey on models and methods to assess the weights in voting systems. The existing voting systems are divided into two areas. In the first area it is assumed that the votes of all the voters to have equal importance and in the second area voters are classifies into different groups and assumed that each group is assigned a different voting power. In this contribution, some of the most common models and procedures for determining the most favorable weights for each candidate are analyzed.