Voting Systems, Honest Preferences and Pareto Optimality*

Richard Zeckhauser

American Political Science Review, 1973, vol. 67, issue 3, 934-946

Abstract: The market is a decentralized system that can bring about efficient economic decisions. This paper examines whether social choice mechanisms can duplicate this success in the political arena. The famed Arrow result tells us centralized systems cannot achieve efficient, nondictatorial outcomes unless they rely on cardinal preferences. With decentralization, efficiency comes to require something more: the truthful revelation of preferences. Schemes that elicit honest preferences are derived here. By their very structure they are shown to lead to inefficient outcomes. This negative result leads to the question whether the validity of the initial analogy continues. Market-based standards of performance may be innappropriate for investigations of political phenomena.

Date: 1973
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:apsrev:v:67:y:1973:i:03:p:934-946_14

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().