Pairwise Justifiable Changes in Collective Choices

Dolors Berga, Bernardo Moreno, Antonio Nicolò and Salvador BarberÃ
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Antonio Nicolo'

No 1256, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: Consider the following principle regarding the performance of collective choice functions. "If a rule selects alternative x in situation 1, and alternative y in situation 2, there must be an alternative z, and some member of society whose appreciation of z relative to x has increased when going from situation 1 to situation 2". This principle requires a minimal justification for the fall of x in the consideration of society: someone must have decreased its appreciation relative to some other possible alternative. On appropriately restricted domains, pairwise justifiability, along with anonymity and neutrality, characterizes Condorcet consistent rules, thus providing a foundation for the choice of the alternatives that win by majority over all others in pairwise comparisons, when they exist. We also study the consequences of imposing this requirement of pairwise justifiability on a large class of collective choice correspondences that includes social choice and social welfare functions as particular cases. When preference profiles are unrestricted, pairwise justifiability implies dictatorship, and both Arrow's and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite's theorems become corollaries of our general result.

Keywords: Social choice functions; pairwise justifiability; social welfare functions; Condorcet consistency; Arrow's theorem; Gibbard- Satterthwaite's theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/1256-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1256

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().