etical result is available computer simulations can provide useful guidance of the procedure's performance on different choice situations. FI NA L DR AF T 2 According to the enterprise that Rohit Parikh labeled 'social software',3 this could be a remarkable advantage for institutional design. In order to support our claim, we first describe a general kind of choice situation that has not received much attention in the existing research literature. Next, we outline different procedures to aggregate individual opinions in order to produce a collective outcome. We then set criteria for the assessment of epistemic instrumental value, that is: ways to determine the ability of a voting method to track the correct outcome, assuming there is one. Using MATLAB, we run some insightful simulations to compare the performance of our voting methods under various conditions. We conclude by identifying some crucial concerns about the use of computer simulations in order to assess voting procedures for policymaking. 2 Collective decision problems Problems concerning the assignment of economic or human resources, to be decided by a set of agents, are addressed in the literature on social choice.4 Therein, assignment mechanisms are designed to maximize, in a certain sense, a function of social choice; these mechanisms are defined over the set of preferences among the decision-makers. Preferences are private information of the agents that they manifest by means of a ballot. The ballot then allows to make a social choice through an aggregation function. The agents' strategic behavior plays a fundamental role in problems concerning the assignment of goods. Social choice assignment mechanisms try to avoid incentives for individuals to falsify their true preferences. Thus, non-manipulable mechanisms are the most valued and looked for in committees of decision-makers. In this paper, we focus on the process of candidate choice selection by a set of agents (voters). In describing some methods that are common in the literature, we heavily r