On the likelihood of Condorcet's profiles

Fabrice Valognes, Vincent Merlin () and Monica Tataru ()
Additional contact information
Monica Tataru: Department of Mathematics, Northwestern University, 2033 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2730 USA

Social Choice and Welfare, 2002, vol. 19, issue 1, 193-206

Abstract: Consider a group of individuals who have to collectively choose an outcome from a finite set of feasible alternatives. A scoring or positional rule is an aggregation procedure where each voter awards a given number of points, wj, to the alternative she ranks in jth position in her preference ordering; The outcome chosen is then the alternative that receives the highest number of points. A Condorcet or majority winner is a candidate who obtains more votes than her opponents in any pairwise comparison. Condorcet [4] showed that all positional rules fail to satisfy the majority criterion. Furthermore, he supplied a famous example where all the positional rules select simultaneously the same winner while the majority rule picks another one. Let P* be the probability of such events in three-candidate elections. We apply the techniques of Merlin et al. [17] to evaluate P* for a large population under the Impartial Culture condition. With these assumptions, such a paradox occurs in 1.808% of the cases.

Date: 2002-01-21
Note: Received: 30 April 1999/Accepted: 14 September 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/2019001/20190193.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

Related works:
Working Paper: The likelihood of Condorcet's profiles (2002)
Working Paper: On the Likelihood of Condorcet's Profiles (2000)
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:19:y:2002:i:1:p:193-206

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 ().