Topological social choice

The origins of this volume can be traced back to a conference on "Ethics, Economic and Business" organized by Columbia Busi­ ness School in March of 1993, and held in the splendid facilities of Columbia's Casa Italiana. Preliminary versions of several of the papers were presented at that meeting. In July 1994 the Fields Institute of Mathematical Sciences sponsored a workshop on "Geometry, Topology and Markets": additional papers and more refined versions of the original papers were presented there. They were published in their present versions in Social Choice and Wel­ fare, volume 14, number 2, 1997. The common aim of these workshops and this volume is to crystallize research in an area which has emerged rapidly in the last fifteen years, the area of topological approaches to social choice and the theory of games. The area is attracting increasing interest from social choice theorists, game theorists, mathematical econ­ omists and mathematicians, yet there is no authoritative collection of papers in the area. Nor is there any surveyor book to give a perspective and act as a guide to the issues in and contributions to this new area. One of the two aims of this volume is in some measure to play this role: the other aim is of course to present interesting and surprising new results.