Decidability and manipulability in social choice

Gennaro Amendola, Luigi Marengo () and Simona Settepanella

LEM Papers Series from Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy

Abstract: We present a geometric model of social choice among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of constituent elements an authority enjoys a vast power of determining the social outcome, as locally or globally stable social optima can be created or eliminated. At the same time, by bundling and unbundling elements, it is also possible to greatly increase or decrease decidability both because the likelihood of intransitive cycles varies and because the time required to reach a social optimum varies. In this paper we present a rigorous framework which allows us to study this trade-off between decidability and non-manipulability.

Keywords: Social choice; agenda; object construction; hyperplane arrangement; directed graphs; algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2012/11

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