Engineering

Bandwidth (computing)

Microeconomics

Social choice theory

Telecommunications

Distortion (music)

Economics

Market economy

Data mining

Amplifier

Computer science

Management science

Mechanical engineering

Social Welfare

Political science

Work (physics)

Data science

Welfare

Measure (data warehouse)

The notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency---typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents---due to having access only to limited information about the preferences of the agents. We survey the most significant results of the literature on distortion from the past 15 years, and highlight important open problems and the most promising avenues of ongoing and future work.

Distortion in Social Choice Problems: The First 15 Years and Beyond