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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00911/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Mapping Social Choice Theory to RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13038/) (2024)
- [Distortion of AI Alignment: Does Preference Optimization Optimize for Preferences?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23749/) (2025)
- [Direct Alignment with Heterogeneous Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16320/) (2025)
- [Projection Optimization: A General Framework for Multi-Objective and Multi-Group RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15145/) (2025)
- [Plurality Veto: A Simple Voting Rule Achieving Optimal Metric Distortion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07098/) (2022)
- [AI-driven Prices for Externalities and Sustainability in Production Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06060/) (2021)
- [Best of Both Distortion Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19453/) (2023)
- [Breaking the Metric Voting Distortion Barrier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17838/) (2023)
- [Proportional Representation in Metric Spaces and Low-Distortion Committee Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10369/) (2023)
- [Optimizing Multiple Simultaneous Objectives for Voting and Facility Location](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03467/) (2022)
- [AI Alignment From Social Choice Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21550/) (2026)
- [The Limits of Preference Data for Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19964/) (2025)
- [Embeddings for Preferences, Not Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08360/) (2026)
- [Distortion of AI Alignment Revisited: RLHF is a Decent Utilitarian Aligner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12651/) (2026)
- [The Distortion of Binomial Voting Defies Expectation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15657/) (2023)
- [Compatibility of Max and Sum Objectives for Committee Selection and k-Facility Location](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17063/) (2025)
- [Groupwise Distortion Guarantees for Preference-Based Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05450/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.