A linear inequality method of establishing certain social choice conjectures
J. Chamberlin and
Malcolm Cohen
Public Choice, 1978, vol. 33, issue 2, 5-16
Abstract:
This paper demonstrates the equivalence between sets of linear inequalities and a variety of social choice problems, a fact which permits the solution of the problems using linear programming techniques. An important advantage of this approach is that the primal solution of the linear programming problem, if one exists, provides a specific example illustrating the social choice conjecture under consideration. Examples illustrating this approach to several standard types of social choice problems are presented. Social choice theory relies heavily on demonstrations that various social choice functions can disagree with one another or that these functions are inconsistent with one or more fundamental conditions or axioms held to be desirable properties of a method of deriving a “fair and reasonable” social choice from a set of individual preference orderings. A large class of such conjectures can be shown to be equivalent to systems of linear inequalities. This equivalence makes it possible to establish the truth or falsehood of such social choice conjectures by testing the systems for consistency or by employing one of the many available algorithms to solve the corresponding linear programs. We will give below a number of examples of conjectures resolved in this fashion, but first we must show how the appropriate inequality systems and linear programs may be found. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division 1978
Date: 1978
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF00118354 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
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:kap:pubcho:v:33:y:1978:i:2:p:5-16
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/BF00118354
Access Statistics for this article
Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II
More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().