Voting with Evaluations: When Should We Sum? What Should We Sum?

Antonin Macé

No 1544, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: Most studies of the voting literature take place in the arrovian framework, in which voters rank the available alternatives, and where Arrow's impossibility theorem prevails. I consider a different informational basis for social decisions, by allowing individuals to evaluate alternatives rather than to rank them. Voters express their opinion by assigning to each alternative an evaluation from a given set. I focus on additive rules, which follow the utilitarian paradigm. If the evaluations are numbers, the elected alternative is the one with the highest sum of evaluations. I generalize this notion to any set of evaluations, taking into account the possibility of qualitative ones. I provide an axiomatization for each of the two main additive rules: "Range Voting" when the set of evaluations is [0, 1] and "Evaluative Voting" when the set of evaluations is finite.

Keywords: Range Voting; Evaluative Voting; utilitarianism; measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C02 D63 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2015-10-29, Revised 2015-10-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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