We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences - that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

This article surveys the literature that investigates the consistency of Arrow's social choice axioms when his unrestricted domain assumptions are replaced by domain conditions that incorporate the restrictions on agendas and preferences encountered in economic environments. Both social welfare...

This paper presents a laboratory experiment to measure the effect of group membership on individual behavior in modified dictator games. The results suggest that this effect is influenced by the degree of group membership saliency. A within-subject design is employed: in stage 1, each subject...

This article establishes versions of Moulin's (Public Choice 35:437-455, 1980) characterizations of various classes of strategy-proof social choice functions when the domain consists of all profiles of single-peaked preferences on an arbitrary subset of the real line. Two results are established...

This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which...

This paper builds on a recent proposal for microeconomic foundations for "representative agents". Herzberg [Journal of Mathematical Economics, vol. 46, no. 6, 1115-1124 (2010)] constructed a representative utility function for infinite-dimensional social decision problems and since the decision...

Judgment (or logical) aggregation theory is logically more powerful than social choice theory and has been put to use to recover some classic results of this field. Whether it could also enrich it with genuinely new results is still controversial. To support a positive answer, we prove a social...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

This chapter provides a survey of utilitarian theories of justice. We review and discuss axiomatizations of utilitarian and generalized-utilitarian social-evaluation functionals in a welfarist framework. Section 2 introduces, along with some basic definitions, social-evaluation functionals....