Axiomatic Concensus Theory in Group Choice and Biomathematics

Bioconsensus is a rapidly evolving scientific field in which consensus methods, often developed for use in social choice theory, are adapted for such areas of the biological sciences as taxonomy, systematics, and evolutionary and molecular biology. Typically, after several alternatives are produced using different data sets, methods or algorithms, one needs to find a consensus solution. The axiomatic approach of this book explores the existence or nonexistence of consensus rules that satisfy particular sets of desirable well-defined properties. The axiomatic research reviewed here focuses first on the area of group choice, then in areas of biomathematics where the objects of interest represent partitions of a set, hierarchical structures, phylogenetic trees, or molecular sequences.