It is well known that when all voters in an electorate have preferences consistent with a single underlying dimension, then the electorate's aggregate preferences must be transitive. However, analyses of historical elections suggest that voters frequently view political alternatives (parties and...

Arrow showed that there is no general way to aggregate non-interpersonally comparable preferences or welfare into either a sensible social choice or a social welfare measure. With majority rule the problem manifests itself as voting cycles. The standard response to this problem has been...

It is shown that a fundamental question of revealed preference theory, namely whether the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP) implies the strong axiom of revealed preference (SARP), can be reduced to a Hamiltonian cycle problem: A set of bundles allows a preference cycle of irreducible...

This paper provides a distance based analysis of the Borda rule with respect to Condorcet’s criterion. It shows that the minimal Condorcet consistency present in the Borda rule, whenever a Condorcet winner (the alternative that wins against every other alternative in a pairwise contest)...

This work consists of two parts: First, it is shown that for a two-dimensional commodity space any homothetic utility function that rationalizes each pair of observations in a set of consumption data also rationalizes the entire set of observations. The result is stated as a pairwise version of...

The double contrast between allocation and process and between formal proof and empirically based reasoning is selectively applied to the history of economics. Hume's rejection of provable knowledge led to Smith's psychological explanation of science and thence to his theory of growth through...