Oligarchies in Spatial Environments

Lars Ehlers and Ton Storcken

Cahiers de recherche from Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ

Abstract: In spatial environments we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow’s requirements, i.e. weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. Individual preferences measure distances between alternatives according to the Lp-norm (for a fixed p => 1). When the policy space is multi-dimensional and the set of alternatives has a non-empty interior and it is compact and convex, any quasi-transitive welfare function must be oligarchic. As a corollary we obtain that for transitive welfare functions weak Pareto, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and non-dictatorship are inconsistent if the set of alternatives has a non-empty interior and it is compact and convex.

JEL-codes: D70 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Oligarchies in spatial environments (2009)
Working Paper: Oligarchies in Spatial Environments (2007)
Working Paper: Oligarchies in spatial environments (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montec:09-2007

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