Oligarchies in Spatial Environments

Lars Ehlers and Ton Storcken

Cahiers de recherche from Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques

Abstract: In spatial environments we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow’s requirements, i.e. weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. Individual preferences measure distances between alternatives according to the Lp-norm (for a fixed p => 1). When the policy space is multi-dimensional and the set of alternatives has a non-empty interior and it is compact and convex, any quasi-transitive welfare function must be oligarchic. As a corollary we obtain that for transitive welfare functions weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship are inconsistent if the set of alternatives has a non-empty interior and it is compact and convex.

JEL-codes: D70 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
Date: Written 2007

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http://hdl.handle.net/1866/2141 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Oligarchies in Spatial Environments (2007)
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