Multidimensional welfare rankings under weight imprecision: a social choice perspective

Stergios Athanassoglou ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Stergios Athanasoglou

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 44, issue 4, 719-744

Abstract: Ranking alternatives based on multidimensional welfare indices depends, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of welfare are weighted. In this paper, a theoretical framework is presented that yields a set of consensus rankings in the presence of such weight imprecision. The main idea is to consider a vector of weights as an imaginary voter submitting preferences over alternatives. With this voting construct in mind, the well-known Kemeny rule from social choice theory is introduced as a means of aggregating the preferences of many plausible choices of weights, suitably weighted by the importance attached to them. The axiomatic characterization of Kemeny’s rule due to Young and Levenglick ( 1978 ) and Young ( 1988 ) extends to the present context. An analytic solution is derived for an interesting special case of the model corresponding to generalized weighted means and the $$\epsilon $$ ϵ -contamination framework of Bayesian statistics. The model is applied to the ARWU index of Shanghai University. Graph-theoretic insights are shown to facilitate computation significantly. Copyright European Union 2015

Keywords: D71; D72; I31; C61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00355-014-0858-z

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