IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v17y2000i2p337-365.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Unlikelihood of Condorcet's paradox in a large society

Author

Listed:
  • A. S. Tangian

    (Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Lehrgebiet Statistik und ãkonometrie, Fern-UniversitÄt Hagen, Postfach 940, D-58084 Hagen, Germany)

Abstract

We provide intuitive, formal, and computational evidence that in a large society Condorcet's paradox (the intransitivity of social preference obtained by pairwise vote) can hardly occur. For that purpose, we compare two models of social choice, one based on voting and another one based on summing individual cardinal utilities, expressed either in reals, or integers. We show that in a probabilistic model with a large number of independent individuals both models, almost surely, provide the same decision results. This implies that Condorcet's and Borda's methods tend to give the same decisions as the number of voters increases. Therefore, in the model with a large number of voters, the transitivity of the Borda preference is inherent in a majority preference as well.

Suggested Citation

  • A. S. Tangian, 2000. "Unlikelihood of Condorcet's paradox in a large society," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 17(2), pages 337-365.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:17:y:2000:i:2:p:337-365
    Note: Received: 26 June 1998/Accepted: 16 April 1999
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/0017002/00170337.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Regenwetter, Michel & Marley, A. A. J. & Grofman, Bernard, 2002. "A general concept of majority rule," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 405-428, July.
    2. Pivato, Marcus, 2015. "Condorcet meets Bentham," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 58-65.
    3. Marcus Pivato, 2016. "Asymptotic utilitarianism in scoring rules," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 47(2), pages 431-458, August.
    4. Regenwetter, Michel & Grofman, Bernard & Marley, A. A. J., 2002. "On the model dependence of majority preference relations reconstructed from ballot or survey data," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 451-466, July.
    5. Tigran Melkonyan & Zvi Safra, 2016. "Intrinsic Variability in Group and Individual Decision Making," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(9), pages 2651-2667, September.
    6. Regenwetter, Michel, 2008. "Perspectives on preference aggregation," Papers 08-26, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.

    More about this item

    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:sochwe:v:17:y:2000:i:2:p:337-365. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.