Voting for locating facilities: The wisdom of voters

Abstract

In this chapter we discuss the quality of decisions made by stakeholders with voting rights under some assumptions on their intention of maximising their own personal utility rather than the common good. In especial, we focus on decisions made by a particular social choice mechanism, Condorcet method, and how good are the voted decisions when compared to those of a central decision maker. Thus, this chapter brings to the front row the opposing views of centralised versus decentralised decision making. It makes a review of the state of the art in this subject, and highlights very recent results, in especial, the work presented in Menezes and Huang (Comput Oper Res 62:350–355, 2015), Drezner and Menezes (Ann Oper Res 246:205–226, 2014) and Menezes et al. (Eur J Oper Res 253:195–203, 2016).