John Lawrence
In 1951 Kenneth Arrow published a book in which he proved that social choice was impossible. There was no way to amalgamate individual preferences into a social preference in such a way that certain rational and normative conditions were met. Later Gibbard and Satterthwaite proved that any such amalgamation of individual preferences in which there was no advantage to any individual to use strategy to order their preferences insincerely in order to get a better result for themselves was also impossible. These impossibility theorems have been thought to rule out direct democracy and also welfare economics. Instead of simple amalgamation, we have devised a more general information processing system which represents the implementation of a mechanism that accepts inputs from individual choosers as utilitarian ratings and outputs a social choice in the form of a complete ordinal ranking. It is a hybrid utilitarian approval system (UAV).