This paper uses the results of a poll held at Université Laval to illustrate the difficulty in aggregating individual preferences. In this poll, voters were asked to rank four candidates for a position of dean. The paper provides a brief survey of the literature on the theory of social choice,...

The author shows how, under certain conditions, results from the Quebec Input-Output model can be aggregated to obtain familiar components of the National Accounts and to derive income multipliers. These multipliers are also discussed and compared to other types of multipliers.

Drissi-Bakhkhat and Truchon ["Maximum Likelihood Approach to Vote Aggregation with Variable Probabilities," Social Choice and Welfare, 23, (2004), 161-185.] extend the Condorcet-Kemeny-Young maximum likelihood approach to vote aggregation by relaxing the assumption that the probability of...

If individual voters observe the true ranking on a set of alternatives with error, then the social choice problem, that is, the problem of aggregating their observations, is one of statistical inference. This study develops a statistical methodology that can be used to evaluate the properties of...

We approach the social choice problem as one of optimal statistical inference. If individual voters or judges observe the true order ona set of alternatives with error, then it is possible to use the set of individual rankings to make probability statements about the correct social order. Given...

The question addressed in this paper is the order of magnitude of the difference between the Borda rule and any given social choice function. A social choice function is a mapping that associates a subset of alternatives to any profile of individual preferences. The Borda rule consists in asking...

A voting situation, in which voters are asked to rank all candidates pair by pair, induces a tournament and a weighted tournament, in which the strenght of the majority matters. Each of these two tournaments induces in turn a two-player zero-sum game for which different solution concepts can be...

The usual Condorcet Criterion says that if an alternative is ranked ahead of all other alternatives by an absolute majority of voters, it should be declared the winner. The following partial extension of this criterion to other ranks is proposed: If an alternative is consistently ranked ahead of...