 Is the preference of the majority representative ?Mihir Bhattacharya and Nicolas Gravel () Post-Print from HAL Abstract: 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 that it minimizes the sum of distances between itself and the preferences in the profile for a given distance function. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for such a distance to always 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 does satisfy this property, along with many others. All distances that satisfy this property can be written as a sum of strictly positive weights assigned to the ordered pairs of alternatives by which any two preferences differ. Keywords: Binary relations; Majority; Distance; Aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Mathematical Social Sciences, 2021, 114, pp.87-94. ⟨10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2021.04.001⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03545861 DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2021.04.001 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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