An extension of Condorcet's paradox by McGarvey (1953) asserts that for every asymmetric relation R on a finite set of candidates there is a strict-preferences voter profile that has the relation R as its strict simple majority relation. We prove that McGarvey's theorem can be extended to...

In this paper we study the social preferences obtained from monotone neutral social welfare functions for random individual preferences. It turns out that there are two extreme types of behavior. On one side, there are social welfare functions, such as the majority rule, that lead to stochastic...

A review of Steven E. Landsburg's book More Sex is Safer Sex, the Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. The surprise 2005 best seller Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner launched a small genre of books by economists applying economic reasoning to everyday life and finding...

We describe a Fourier-theoretic formula for the probability of rational outcomes for random profiles for a social choice function on three alternatives. Several applications are given.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which the concepts of individual and collective choice unsed in economic theory desribe "predictable" or "learnable" behavior. Given a set X of N alternatives, a choice function c is a mapping which assigns to nonempty subsets S of X an...

Arrow's theorem asserts that under certain conditions every non-dictatorial social choice function leads to nonrational social choice for some profiles. In other words, for the case of non-dictatorial social choice if we observe that the society prefers alternative A over B and alternative B...