Implicit utilitarian voting

The system tries to select an alternative which maximizes the sum of utilities, as in the utilitarian social choice rule, based only on the ranking information provided.

[1] Implicit utilitarian voting attempts to approximate score voting or the utilitarian rule, even in situations where cardinal utilities are unavailable.

The main challenge of implicit utilitarian voting is that rankings do not contain enough information to calculate exact utilities, meaning that maximizing social welfare in all cases is impossible.

Thus, implicit utilitarian voting aims to find an alternative whose social welfare is approximately optimal.

The quality of approximation for a voting rule is measured by its distortion or regret, which measures the worst-case error (utility loss) caused by using the ranked-voting rule to approximate utility.