Finding the majority-rule equilibrium under lexicographic comparison of candidates

Susan O. Griffin, Joyendu Bhadury, Lakshmi S. Narasimhan and Paul M. Griffin (*),
Additional contact information
Susan O. Griffin: Department of Economics, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Joyendu Bhadury: Faculty of Administration, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, N.B., Canada E3B5A3
Lakshmi S. Narasimhan: OHMS Consulting, Atlanta, GA, USA
Paul M. Griffin (*),: School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0205, USA

Social Choice and Welfare, 1998, vol. 15, issue 4, 489-508

Abstract: This paper considers the well studied problem of the existence of an undominated point, under the assumption of lexicographic preferences of voters, as espoused by Taylor in [24]. We extend Taylor's model to situations were we allow for (i) voters to have different ranings of the issues in n-dimensional issue space and (ii) a candidate to be disregarded by a voter if his stand on any one or more of the issues involved in the election is perceived to be too extreme by the voter and (iii) combinations of (i) and (ii). We extend the results of Taylor by demonstrating the non-existence of an equilibrium point in these models in general and then showing that under special circumstances, specialized variants of the "median" point(s) represent equilibrium or undominated points in these models too. Thus a model of voting behavior results that is closer approximation of reality in that historically incumbents tend to win. The primary conclusion of the paper is to suggest that incumbents tend to have an advantage when the election process is characterized by a large presence of special interests or as information becomes more expensive to acquire.

Date: 1998-08-06
Note: Received: 13 February 1996 / Accepted: 27 March 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/8015004/80150489.pdf (application/pdf)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/0035 ... 15004/80150489.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:1998:i:4:p:489-508

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 ().