Topological Social Choice

Luc Lauwers

Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven

Abstract: The topological approach to social choice was developed by Graciela Chichilnisky in the beginning of the eighties. The main result in this area (known as the resolution of the topological social choice paradox) shows that a space of preferences admits of a continuous, anonymous, and unanimous aggregation rule for every number of individuals if and only if this space is contractible. Furthermore, connections between the Pareto principle, dictatorship, and manipulation were established. Recently, Baryshnikov used the topological approach to demonstrate that Arrow's impossibility theorem can be reformulated in terms of the non-contractibility of spheres. This paper discusses these results in a self-contained way, emphasizes the social choice interpretation of some topological concepts, and surveys the area of topological aggregation.

Date: 1999-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Topological social choice (2000)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:ceswps:ces9912

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