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...

We study the problem of locating a single public good along a segment when agents have single-dipped preferences. We ask whether there are unanimous and strategy-proof rules for this model. The answer is positive and we characterize all such rules. We generalize our model to allow the set of...

This introduces the symposium on judgment aggregation. The theory of judgment ag­gregation asks how several individuals' judgments on some logically connected propositions can be aggregated into consistent collective judgments. The aim of this intro­duction is to show how ideas from the...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences for public goods. A mechanism design approach is used to characterize implementable tax and expenditure policies. A robustness requirement in the sense of Bergemann...

Stanford students were shown hypothetical preference profiles involving 3 to 5 voters and 2 to 6 alternatives. Profiles were constructed to test subjects' adherence to two related social choice criteria implicated in Arrow's impossibility theorem: inter-menu consistency (IMC) – which is a...

A new class of preference-aggregation rules is proposed, weak-veto rules. Weak-veto rules are applicable in settings characterized by strong pre-existing views on the desirability of different outcomes, whose recommendations should be modified only in the presence of strenuous opposition. They...

In several situations agents need to be assigned to activities on basis of their preferences, and each agent can take part in at most one activity. Often, the preferences of the agents do not depend only on the activity itself but also on the number of participants in the respective activity. In...

Multidimensional welfare analysis has recently been revived by money-metric measures based on explicit fairness principles and the respect of individual preferences. To operationalize this approach, preference heterogeneity can be inferred from the observation of individual choices (revealed...

In this paper we present some results for preference aggregation functionals defined on rich admissible sets. Our results are concerned with an Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives assumption due to Alan D. Taylor suitably adjusted to be applicable in the framework of preference aggregation...