This paper reports on the results of a series of experimental laboratory elections. The novelty of the design allows me to study both coordination failures and coordination efficiency in a repeated-game, divided majority setting. I assess and compare the performance of three voting mechanisms,...

We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...

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...

The goal of this paper is to draw some lessons for economic theory from research in psychology, social psychology and, more briefly, in biology, which purports to explain the formation of social preferences. We elicit the basic mechanisms whereby a variety of social preferences are determined in...

In this paper we re-examine the axiomatic basis of the key result on weighted utilitarian representation of preference orders on finite utility streams. We show that a preference order satisfying the axioms of Minimal Individual Symmetry, Invariance and Strong Pareto need not have a...

Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals’ mechanism choices in...

An anonymous social choice function for a large atomless population maps cross-section distributions of preferences into outcomes. Because any one individual is too insignificant to affect these distributions, every anonymous social choice function is individually strategy- proof. However, not...

We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity - i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the...

We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity – i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the...

The common choice theory in economics is based on the assumption that an individual is defined in terms of a binary preference relation. This preference relation is defined over alternatives without taking into account menu dependence and, in particular, freedom of choice or, more generally, the...