Single-switch preferences and the Ostrogorski paradox

G. Laffond and Jean Lainé

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The Ostrogorski paradox refers to the possibility for a democratically chosen program involving finitely many binary decisions to be unpopular. It deals with the potential conflict arising between two majority-based choice procedures from a set of alternatives {− 1, 1}N, where N stands for the number of decisions. The first procedure is the simple majority rule applied decision-wise. In the second procedure, voters valuate programs through their symmetric distance to an ideal, and programs are compared according to the simple majority rule. This paper characterizes the preference domain (i.e., the set of ideals) which allows to avoid the paradox for any number of voters and any number of decisions. We prove that such a domain contains all those preference profiles sharing a property called single-switchness, of which we provide alternative interpretations.

Keywords: Voting paradox; Ostrogorski; Majority rule; Compound majority voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published in Mathematical Social Sciences, 2006, 52 (1), pp.49-66

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

Related works:
Journal Article: Single-switch preferences and the Ostrogorski paradox (2006)
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:hal:journl:halshs-00107961

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().