Solving the Social Choice problem under equality constraints

Juan A. Crespo and J.j Sanchez-Gabites

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Suppose that a number of equally qualified agents want to choose collectively an element from a set of alternatives defined by equality constraints. Each agent may well prefer a different element, and the social choice problem consists in deciding whether it is possible to design a rule to aggregate all the agents’ preferences into a social choice in an egalitarian way. In this paper we obtain criteria that solve this problem in terms of conditions that are explicitly computable from the constraints. As a theoretical consequence, we show that the only way to avoid running into a social choice paradox consists in designing (if possible) the set of alternatives satisfying certain optimality condition on the constraints, that is, in the natural way from the point of view of economics.

Keywords: Social choice; optimization; rational design. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C60 D63 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse and nep-mic
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