Though the social choice of social institutions or social results is impossible there is, strictly speaking, no social choice individual evaluations of social institutions or results trivially are possible. Such individual evaluations can be deemed liberal either because they emphasize political...

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its...

In the very general setting of Armstrong (1980) for Arrow's Theorem, I show two results. First, in an infinite society, Anonymity is inconsistent with Unanimity and Independence if and only if a domain for social welfare functions satisfies a modest condition of richness. While Arrow's axioms...

We study the decision process in a group dictator game in which three subjects can distribute an initial endowment between themselves and a group of recipients. The experiment consists of two stages: first, individuals play a standard dictator game. Second, individuals are randomly matched into...

This paper examines a model of duopoly firms selling to an exogenously formed buyer group consisting of members with heterogeneous preferences. Two research questions are addressed: (1) when is it optimal for a buyer group to commit to exclusive purchase from a single seller, and (2) how does...

This chapter discusses different types of domain restrictions. We begin by analyzing various qualitative conditions on preference profiles. Value-restricted preferences (with single-peaked preferences as one of its subcases), limited agreement as well as antagonistic and dichotomous preferences...

Given a set of outcomes that affect the welfare of the members of a group, K.J. Arrow imposed the following five conditions on the ordering of the outcomes as a function of the preferences of the individual group members, and then proved that the conditions are logically inconsistent: • The...

I build a model to make a key point that social welfare functions that only rely on individual utility (or individual preference orderings) still may reflect what people typically think of as a non-welfarist approach, further suggesting that non-welfarist methods (e.g., paternalistic methods)...

We study the phenomenon of strategic polarization in group interactions. Agents with private preferences choose a public action (e.g., voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group outcome and...