Several approaches exist to illuminate and clarify public values relevant for making public policy decisions. These include surveys, indirect and direct value elicitation, focus groups and public involvement. This paper describes a new approach, called the public value forum, which combines...

Given a group composed of N individuals and given that each has rated all of the alternatives using a cardinal utility function, the problem is to aggregate these to obtain a group cardinal utility function for evaluating each alternative. The cardinal utilities indicate the strength of...

This paper addresses the problem of constructing a group cardinal social welfare function whose arguments are the individual utility functions of group members. Representation theorems are given which show that the social welfare function is restricted to special forms if certain "reasonable"...

To solve or resolve public policy problems requires decisions. The intent is to choose the best alternative in each situation. Hence, the way the notion of best is defined and measured in each case is critical. A structured process is outlined to acquire knowledge about public values that could...