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Aggregation and Social Choice: A Mean Voter Theorem

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Caplin

    (Columbia University)

  • Barry Nalebuff

    (Yale School of Management)

Abstract

A celebrated result of Black (1984a) demonstrates the existence of a simple majority winner when preferences are single-peaked. The social choice follows the preferences of the median voter's most preferred outcome beats any alternative. However, this conclusion does not extend to elections in which candidates differ in more than one dimension. This paper provides a multi-dimensional analog of the median voter result. We show that the mean voter's most preferred outcome is unbeatable according to a 64%-majority rule. The weaker conditions supporting this result represent a significant generalization of Caplin and Nalebuff (1988). The proof of our mean voter result uses a mathematical aggregation theorem due to Prekopa (1971, 1973) and Borell (1975). This theorem has broad applications in economics. An application to the distribution of income is described at the end of this paper; results on imperfect competition are presented in the companion paper [CFDP 937].

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Caplin & Barry Nalebuff, 1990. "Aggregation and Social Choice: A Mean Voter Theorem," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 938, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:938
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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