When a counter-proposal is made to an initiative to change the Swiss constitution, the citizenry makes three binary majority choices: the initiative versus the status quo, the initiative versus the counter-proposal, and the status quo versus the counterproposal as a tie-breaker. If there is a...

This article shows that for a citizen with reciprocal preferences, voting can be a rational act. Even in elections with many voters, when the probability of being the pivotal voter is close to zero, the utility generated by strong reciprocal sentiments can compensate the material costs of...

In standard political economy models, voters are self-interested i.e. care only about own utility. However, the emerging evidence indicates that voters often have other-regarding preferences (ORP), i.e., in deciding among alternative policies voters care about their payoffs relative to others....

The nonasymptotic Condorcet jury theorem states that, under certain conditions, group decision-making by simple majority voting can decide more efficiently than single-person decision-making, in terms of having a higher probability of choosing the better alternative. Wit (1998) showed that the...

We define and examine the concept of social acceptability of committees, in multi-winner elections context. We say that a committee is socially acceptable if each member in this committee is socially acceptable, i.e., the number of voters who rank her in their top half of the candidates is at...

We introduce voter uncertainty to the unidimensional spatial model of elections. Strategic voters choose between the status quo and a proposed reform, and there is uncertainty about the location of the reform on the policy space. If each possible location of the reform is on the same side of the...

We say that an alternative is socially acceptable if the number of individuals who rank it among their most preferred half of the alternatives is at least as large as the number of individuals who rank it among the least preferred half. A Condorcet winner may not be socially acceptable. However,...

For committee or multiwinner elections, the Chamberlin-Courant rule (CCR), which combines the Borda rule and the proportional representation, aims to pick the most representative committee (Chamberlin and Courant, 1983). Chamberlin and Courant (1983) have shown that if the size of the committee...

Prior to a collective binary choice, members of a group receive binary signals correlated with the better option. Expanding membership may provide no benefit, but expertise is everywhere beneficial. If the group ignores any statistical dependence among the signals, as through majority vote, an...

This paper presents the conditions required for a profile in order to never exhibit either the strong or the strict Borda paradoxes under all weighted scoring rules in three-candidate elections. The main particularity of our paper is that all the conclusions are extracted from the differences of...