Is polling effective in understanding preferences of a group of
people? It depends on the type of questions asked.
Polling generally asks which candidate people prefer among all, but
this is not always useful for eliciting the full spectrum of the
choice of voters. Social choice theory shows that this may result in
incomplete information and an unexpected candidate winning. A better
polling strategy is to ask complete preferences to understand how
close different candidates are in terms of overall preference.
If you
would like to learn more, consider taking the Computational Social
Choice course offered in 2018 spring.