In Majority Judgment, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki argue that the traditional
theory of social choice offers no acceptable solution to the problems of how to elect, to judge, or
to rank. They find that the traditional model--transforming the "preference lists" of individuals
into a "preference list" of society--is fundamentally flawed in both theory and practice. Balinski
and Laraki propose a more realistic model. It leads to an entirely new theory and method--majority
judgment--proven superior to all known methods. It is at once meaningful, resists strategic
manipulation, elicits honesty, and is not subject to the classical paradoxes encountered in
practice, notably Condorcet's and Arrow's. They offer theoretical, practical, and experimental
evidence--from national elections to figure skating competitions--to support their arguments.Drawing
on insights from wine, sports, music, and other competitions, Balinski and Laraki argue that the
question should not be how to transform many individual rankings into a single collective ranking,
but rather, after defining a common language of grades to measure merit, how to transform the many
individual evaluations of each competitor into a single collective evaluation of all competitors.
The crux of the matter is a new model in which the traditional paradigm--to compare--is replaced by
a new paradigm--to evaluate.