Neutrality, Pairwise Justifiability and Serial Dictatorships

Pietro Salmanso, Bernardo Moreno and Dolors Berga

No 1508, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We consider a society composed of a finite set of agents with preferences over a finite set of alternatives. We focus on collective choice correspondences which are rules assigning to each pair formed by agents' preferences and a subset of alternatives (an agenda), a chosen subset of the agenda. Our analysis centers on three properties: neutrality, strong pairwise justifiability, and strong decisiveness. Neutrality requires that no alternative is intrinsically favored over another. Strong pairwise justifiability demands that if an alternative x is selected in one situation but not in another, there must exist some other alternative z , present in both agendas, whose relative ranking with respect to x has improved for at least one agent. Strong decisiveness is a property that can be viewed as a particular type of resoluteness. Our main result establishes that serial dictatorships are the only collective choice correspondences defined on the universal domain and across all agendas satisfying neutrality, strong pairwise justifiability, and strong decisiveness.

Keywords: collective choice correspondences; neutrality; serial dictators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D71 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-des and nep-mic
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