Social Choice in Organizations

Abstract:     
This paper models organizational strategy as a social choice. We model how individual preferences for a course of action are aggregated toward an organizational choice and strategy. To accomplish this aggregation we specifically highlight the role of conditional (rather than categorical) preferences. We emphasize the role that two factors play in the aggregation of conditional preferences in organizations: (i) acyclical influence (for example, via organizational hierarchy) and (ii) social coherence. We also model the role of 'coordinatability' and mutual information in the context of aggregating heterogeneous preferences in organizations. Our effort is also to contribute to a more contextualized view of social choice by modeling it, in amended form, within the context of organizations.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 14

Keywords: organization theory, strategy as social choice, preference aggregation

JEL Classification: D71, L1, L2

working papers series