Is the preference of the majority representative?

Mihir Bhattacharya and Nicolas Gravel ()

No 1921, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: Given a profile of preferences on a set of alternatives, a majoritarian relation is a complete binary relation that agrees with the strict preference of a strict majority of these preferences whenever such strict strict majority is observed. We show that a majoritarian relation is, among all conceivable binary relations, the most representative of the profile of preferences from which it emanates. We define "the most representative" to mean "the closest in the aggregate". This requires a definition of what it means for a pair of preferences to be closer to each other then another. We assume that this definition takes the form of a distance function defined over the set of all conceivable preferences. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for such a distance to be minimized by a majoritarian relation. This condition requires the distance to be additive with respect to a plausible notion of compromise between preferences. The well-known Kemeny distance between preferences does satisfy this property. We also provide a characterization of the class of distances satisfying this property as numerical representations of a primitive qualitative proximity relation between preferences.

Keywords: preferences; majority; dissimilarity; distance; aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://new.amse-aixmarseille.fr/sites/default/fil ... /wp_2019_-_nr_21.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Is the preference of the majority representative ? (2021)
Working Paper: Is the preference of the majority representative ? (2021)
Working Paper: Is the preference of the majority representative ? (2019)
Working Paper: Is the Preference of the Majority Representative? (2019)
Working Paper: Is the preference of the majority representative? (2019)
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:aim:wpaimx:1921

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France AMU-AMSE - 5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498 - 13205 Marseille Cedex 1. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gregory Cornu ().