I will introduce my problem with an example. Say you are designing an exam, which consists of a certain set of $n$ independent questions (that the candidates can get either right or wrong). You want to decide on a score to give to each of the questions, with the rule being that candidates with total score above a certain threshold will pass, and the others will fail.
In fact, you are very thorough about this, and you have envisioned all the possible $2^n$ results, and decided for each of them whether a candidate with this performance should pass or fail. So you have a Boolean function $f : \{0, 1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}$ that indicates whether the candidate should pass or fail depending on their exact answers. Of course this function should be monotone: when getting a set of questions right makes you pass, getting any superset right must make you pass as well.
Can you decide on scores (positive real numbers) to give to the questions, and on a threshold, so that your function $f$ is exactly captured by the rule "a candidate passes if the sum of scores for the correct questions is above the threshold"? (Of course the threshold can be taken to be 1 without loss of generality, up to multiplying the scores by a constant.)
Formally: Is there a characterization of the monotone Boolean functions $f: \{0, 1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}$ for which there exist $w_1, \ldots, w_n \in \mathbb{R}_+$ such that for all $v \in \{0, 1\}^n$, we have $f(v) = 1$ iff $\sum_i w_i v_i \geq 1$?
It is not so hard to see that not all functions can be thus represented. For instance the function $(x_1 \wedge x_2) \vee (x_3 \wedge x_4)$ cannot: as $(1, 1, 0, 0)$ is accepted we must have $w_1 + w_2 \geq 1$, so one of $w_1, w_2$ must be $\geq 1/2$, and likewise for $w_3, w_4$. Now, if it is, e.g., $w_1$ and $w_3$, we have a contradiction because $w_1 + w_3 \geq 1$ but $(1, 0, 1, 0)$ is rejected; the other cases are analogous.
This looks to me like a very natural problem, so my main question is to know under which name this has been studied. Asking for a "characterization" is vague, of course; my question is to know whether the class of functions that can be represented in this way has a name, what is known about the complexity of testing whether an input function belongs to it (given as a formula, or as a circuit), etc.
Of course one can think of many variations on this theme. For instance, on real exams, questions are not independent, but there is a DAG on questions indicating the dependence, and candidates can only answer a question if all prerequisites have been answered. The condition on the monotone functions could then be restricted to valuations in $\{0, 1\}^n$ that satisfy the dependencies, and the question would be to determine whether an input function can be thus captured given an input DAG on the variables. One could also think of variants where the scores are $k$-tuples for fixed $k$ (summed pointwise, and compared pointwise to a threshold vector), which can capture more functions than $k = 1$. Alternatively you could want to capture more expressive functions which are not Boolean but go to a totally ordered domain, with different thresholds that should indicate your position in the domain. Last, I'm not sure about what would happen if you allowed negative scores (so you could drop the monotone restriction about the functions).
(Note: What made me wonder about this is the Google Code Jam selection round, where candidates are selected if they reach a certain score threshold, and the scores of problems are presumably carefully designed to reflect what sets of problems are deemed sufficient to get selected. Code Jam has a dependency structure on the questions, with some "large input" questions that cannot be solved unless you have solved the "small input" one first.)
