IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/reecde/v18y2014i1p3-10.html

Intransitive social indifference and the Arrow dilemma

Author

Listed:
  • Allan Gibbard

Abstract

This paper deals with a proposal by Frederic Schick for resolving Arrow’s dilemma of social choice. Schick challenges Arrow’s assumption that rational social indifference is transitive. It turns out, however, that even if we drop this assumption, we still face a dilemma as embarrassing as Arrow’s. Any constitution which satisfies the remaining conditions is a liberum veto oligarchy. This means a unique set of individuals carries any issue on which it is unanimous, and engenders social indifference on any issue which divides it. A formal statement and proof of this theorem follows an informal presentation of the result. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Allan Gibbard, 2014. "Intransitive social indifference and the Arrow dilemma," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 18(1), pages 3-10, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:reecde:v:18:y:2014:i:1:p:3-10
    DOI: 10.1007/s10058-014-0158-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10058-014-0158-1
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10058-014-0158-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gibbard, Allan F., 2014. "Social Choice And The Arrow Conditions," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 30(3), pages 269-284, November.
    2. Amartya Sen, 1969. "Quasi-Transitivity, Rational Choice and Collective Decisions," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 36(3), pages 381-393.
    3. Weymark, John A., 2014. "An Introduction To Allan Gibbard’S Harvard Seminar Paper," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 30(3), pages 263-268, November.
    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


    Cited by:

    1. Wesley H. Holliday & Eric Pacuit, 2020. "Arrow’s decisive coalitions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 54(2), pages 463-505, March.
    2. Juan C. Candeal, 2023. "Social evaluation functionals with an arbitrary set of alternatives," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 95(2), pages 255-271, August.
    3. Duddy, Conal & Piggins, Ashley, 2022. "Collective choice rules with social maximality," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    4. Piggins, Ashley & Duddy, Conal, 2016. "Oligarchy and soft incompleteness," MPRA Paper 72392, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Conal Duddy & Ashley Piggins, 2018. "On some oligarchy results when social preference is fuzzy," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(4), pages 717-735, December.
    6. Duddy, Conal & Piggins, Ashley, 2020. "A foundation for Pareto optimality," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 25-30.
    7. Piggins, Ashley, 2017. "Sen’s proofs of the Arrow and Gibbard theorems," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 99-101.
    8. Ataei, Masoud & Chen, Shengyuan & Yang, Zijiang & Peyghami, M. Reza, 2021. "Theory and applications of financial chaos index," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 580(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. John Weymark, 2014. "An introduction to Allan Gibbard’s oligarchy theorem paper," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 18(1), pages 1-2, March.
    2. Duddy, Conal & Piggins, Ashley, 2020. "A foundation for Pareto optimality," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 25-30.
    3. Susumu Cato, 2018. "Collective rationality and decisiveness coherence," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 50(2), pages 305-328, February.
    4. Cato, Susumu, 2018. "Incomplete decision-making and Arrow’s impossibility theorem," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 58-64.
    5. Susumu Cato, 2015. "Weak Independence and Social Semi-Orders," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 66(3), pages 311-321, September.
    6. Clark, Stephen A., 1995. "Indecisive choice theory," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 155-170, October.
    7. Jingyi Xue, 2018. "Fair division with uncertain needs," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(1), pages 105-136, June.
    8. Indraneel Dasgupta & Prasanta Pattanaik, 2007. "‘Regular’ choice and the weak axiom of stochastic revealed preference," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 31(1), pages 35-50, April.
    9. Bossert, Walter & Suzumura, Kotaro, 2012. "Product filters, acyclicity and Suzumura consistency," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 64(3), pages 258-262.
    10. Christopher Tyson, 2015. "Satisficing behavior with a secondary criterion," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 44(3), pages 639-661, March.
    11. M. Ali Khan & Metin Uyanık, 2021. "Topological connectedness and behavioral assumptions on preferences: a two-way relationship," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 71(2), pages 411-460, March.
    12. John Duggan, 2016. "Preference exclusions for social rationality," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 46(1), pages 93-118, January.
    13. John Duggan, 2019. "Weak rationalizability and Arrovian impossibility theorems for responsive social choice," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 179(1), pages 7-40, April.
    14. Jose Apesteguia & Miguel Ballester, 2009. "A theory of reference-dependent behavior," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 40(3), pages 427-455, September.
    15. Duddy, Conal & Piggins, Ashley, 2022. "Collective choice rules with social maximality," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    16. Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura, 2015. "Expected utility without full transitivity," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 45(4), pages 707-722, December.
    17. Piggins, Ashley, 2017. "Sen’s proofs of the Arrow and Gibbard theorems," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 99-101.
    18. Jeffrey Richelson, 1977. "Conditions on social choice functions," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 79-110, September.
    19. Christopher Tyson, 2013. "Behavioral implications of shortlisting procedures," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(4), pages 941-963, October.
    20. Tyson, Christopher J., 2008. "Cognitive constraints, contraction consistency, and the satisficing criterion," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 138(1), pages 51-70, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:reecde:v:18:y:2014:i:1:p:3-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.