Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Voting rules as statistical estimators

Contents:

Author Info

  • Pivato, Marcus

Abstract

We adopt an `epistemic' interpretation of social decisions: there is an objectively correct choice, each voter receives a `noisy signal' of the correct choice, and the social objective is to aggregate these signals to make the best possible guess about the correct choice. One epistemic method is to fix a probability model and compute the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), maximum a posteriori estimator (MAP) or expected utility maximizer (EUM), given the data provided by the voters. We first show that an abstract voting rule can be interpreted as MLE or MAP if and only if it is a scoring rule. We then specialize to the case of distance-based voting rules, in particular, the use of the median rule in judgement aggregation. Finally, we show how several common `quasiutilitarian' voting rules can be interpreted as EUM.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/30292/
File Function: original version
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 30292.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 13 Apr 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:30292

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-(0)89-2180-2219
Fax: +49-(0)89-2180-3900
Web page: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: voting; maximum likelihood estimator; maximum a priori estimator; expected utility maximizer; statistics; epistemic democracy; Condorcet jury theorem; scoring rule;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Stephen Gordon & Michel Truchon, 2006. "Social Choice, Optimal Inference and Figure Skating," Cahiers de recherche 0624, CIRPEE.
  2. List, Christian & Pettit, Philip, 2002. "Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 18(01), pages 89-110, April.
  3. Michel Truchon, 2006. "Borda and the Maximum Likelihood Approach to Vote Aggregation," Cahiers de recherche 0623, CIRPEE.
  4. Dietrich, Franz & Spiekermann, Kai, 2010. "Epistemic democracy with defensible premises," MPRA Paper 40135, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Jun 2012.
  5. Patrick Hummel, 2010. "Jury theorems with multiple alternatives," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 34(1), pages 65-103, January.
  6. Serguei Kaniovski, 2010. "Aggregation of correlated votes and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 69(3), pages 453-468, September.
  7. Michael Fligner & Joseph Verducci, 1990. "Posterior probabilities for a consensus ordering," Psychometrika, Springer, vol. 55(1), pages 53-63, March.
  8. Drissi, Mohamed & Truchon, Michel, 2002. "Maximum Likelihood Approach to Vote Aggregation with Variable Probabilities," Cahiers de recherche 0211, Université Laval - Département d'économique.
  9. Peyton Young, 1995. "Optimal Voting Rules," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 51-64, Winter.
  10. Michel Truchon & Stephen Gordon, 2006. "Statistical Comparison of Aggregation Rules for Votes," Cahiers de recherche 0625, CIRPEE.
  11. Ruth Ben-Yashar & Jacob Paroush, 2001. "Optimal decision rules for fixed-size committees in polychotomous choice situations," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 737-746.
  12. Pivato, Marcus, 2011. "Variable-population voting rules," MPRA Paper 31896, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  13. Michael Miller & Daniel Osherson, 2009. "Methods for distance-based judgment aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 32(4), pages 575-601, May.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Dietrich, Franz, 2011. "Scoring rules for judgment aggregation," MPRA Paper 35657, University Library of Munich, Germany.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:30292

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ekkehart Schlicht).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.