Uncovering some subtleties of the uncovered set: Social choice theory and distributive politics

David Epstein
Additional contact information
David Epstein: Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA

Social Choice and Welfare, 1997, vol. 15, issue 1, 93 pages

Abstract: Although the uncovered set has occupied a prominent role in social choice theory, its exact shape has never been determined in a general setting. This paper calculates the uncovered set when actors have pork barrel, or purely distributive, preferences, and shows that in this setting nearly the entire Pareto set is uncovered. The result casts doubt on the usefulness of the uncovered set as a general solution concept and suggests that to predict the distribution of political benefits one must explicitly model the institutions that structure collective choice.

Date: 1997-11-13
Note: Received: 29 April 1993/Accepted: 28 June 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7015001/70150081.pdf (application/pdf)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/0035 ... 15001/70150081.ps.gz (application/postscript)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

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:spr:sochwe:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:81-93

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().