Analyzing the Practical Relevance of the Condorcet Loser Paradox and the Agenda Contraction Paradox

Felix Brandt (), Christian Geist () and Martin Strobel ()
Additional contact information
Felix Brandt: Technische Universität München
Christian Geist: Technische Universität München
Martin Strobel: National University of Singapore

A chapter in Evaluating Voting Systems with Probability Models, 2021, pp 97-115 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract A large part of the social choice literature studies voting paradoxes in which seemingly mild properties are violated by common voting rules. In this chapter, we investigate the likelihood of the Condorcet Loser Paradox (CLP) and the Agenda Contraction Paradox (ACP) using Ehrhart theory, computer simulations, and empirical data. We present the first analytical results for the CLP on four alternatives and show that our experimental results, which go well beyond four alternatives, are in almost perfect congruence with the analytical results. It turns out that the CLP—which is often cited as a major flaw of some Condorcet extensions such as Dodgson’s rule, Young’s rule, and MaxiMin—is of no practical relevance. The ACP, on the other hand, frequently occurs under various distributional assumptions about the voters’ preferences. The extent to which it is real threat, however, strongly depends on the voting rule, the underlying distribution of preferences, and, somewhat surprisingly, the parity of the number of voters.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:stcchp:978-3-030-48598-6_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030485986

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48598-6_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Choice and Welfare from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().