Level $$r$$ r consensus and stable social choice

Muhammad Mahajne, Shmuel Nitzan and Oscar Volij ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 45, issue 4, 805-817

Abstract: We propose the concept of level $$r$$ r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level $$r$$ r consensus around a given preference relation, there exists a Condorcet winner. In addition, if the number of individuals is odd the majority relation coincides with the preference relation around which there is such consensus and consequently it is transitive. Furthermore, if the level of consensus is sufficiently strong, the Condorcet winner is chosen by all the scoring rules. Level $$r$$ r consensus therefore ensures the Condorcet consistency of all scoring rules, thus eliminating the tension between decision rules inspired by ranking-based utilitarianism and the majority rule. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-015-0882-7 (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:spr:sochwe:v:45:y:2015:i:4:p:805-817

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

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-015-0882-7

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 ().