Condorcet admissibility: Indeterminacy and path-dependence under majority voting on interconnected decisions

Nehring, Klaus and Pivato, Marcus and Puppe, Clemens (2011): Condorcet admissibility: Indeterminacy and path-dependence under majority voting on interconnected decisions.

Abstract

Judgement aggregation is a model of social choice where the space of social alternatives is the set of consistent evaluations (`views') on a family of logically interconnected propositions, or yes/no-issues. Unfortunately, simply complying with the majority opinion in each issue often yields a logically inconsistent collection of judgements. Thus, we consider the Condorcet set: the set of logically consistent views which agree with the majority in as many issues as possible. Any element of this set can be obtained through a process of diachronic judgement aggregation, where the evaluations of the individual issues are decided through a sequence of majority votes unfolding over time, with earlier decisions possibly imposing logical constraints on later decisions. Thus, for a fixed profile of votes, the ultimate social choice can depend on the order in which the issues are decided; this is called path dependence. We investigate the size and structure of the Condorcet set ---and hence the scope and severity of path-dependence ---for several important classes of judgement aggregation problems.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: judgement aggregation; diachronic; path-dependence; indeterminacy; Condorcet; median rule; majoritarian
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice ; Clubs ; Committees ; Associations

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