AGENDA MANIPULATION-PROOFNESS,STALEMATES, AND THE WORTH OF REDUNDANT ELICITATION IN PREFERENCE AGGREGATION. EXPOSING THE BRIGHT SIDE OF ARROW'S THEOREM

Stefano Vannucci ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: This paper provides a general framework to explore the possibility of agenda manipulation-proof and proper consensus-based preference aggregation rules, so powerfully called in doubt by a disputable if widely shared understanding of Arrow’s ‘general possibility theorem’. We consider two alternative versions of agenda manipulation-proofness for social welfare functions, that are distinguished by ‘parallel’ vs. ‘sequential’ execution of agenda formation and preference elicitation, respectively. Under the ‘parallel’ version, it is shown that a large class of anonymous and idem-potent social welfare functions that satisfy both agenda manipulation-proofness and strategy-proofness on a natural domain of single-peaked ‘meta-preferences’ induced by arbitrary total preference preorders are indeed available. It is only under the second, ‘sequential’ version that agenda manipulation-proofness on the same natural domain of single-peaked ‘meta-preferences’ is in fact shown to be equivalent to the classic Arrowian ‘independence of irrelevant alternatives’ for social welfare functions. In particular, it is shown that combining such ‘sequential’ version of agenda manipulation-proofness with a very minimal requirement of distributed responsiveness results in a characterization of the ‘global stalemate’ social welfare function, the constant function which invariably selects universal social indi¤erence. It is also argued that, altogether, the foregoing results provide new significant insights concerning the actual content and the constructive implications of Arrow’s ‘general possibility theorem’ from a mechanism-design perspective

Keywords: Agenda manipulation; strategy-proofness; social welfare functions; aggregation; median join-semilattices. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/881.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:usi:wpaper:881

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabrizio Becatti ().