IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v23y2004i2p207-227.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The instability of robust aggregation

Author

Listed:
  • Matthias Hild

Abstract

Levi’s ‘robust aggregation’ suggests a generalization of the standard ‘ex ante’ mode of aggregating individuals’ expected utilities into a social choice function. This generalization applies some social choice rule not only to the actual individuals but also to hypothetical individuals with all possible combinations of the actual individuals’ probabilities and utilities. We show that robust aggregation can lead to preference reversals in the social choice when the very same decision situation is described with different degrees of detail, thus violating a desirable stability condition. We also show that any stable robust social choice rule must collapse back into the ex ante mode without recourse to hypothetical individuals. Under sufficient conditions, such as strong Pareto optimality, robust aggregation even leads to an infinite series of reversals in group choices. By contrast, stability is ubiquitous in the standard ex ante mode and is closely related to independence of irrelevant alternatives. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004

Suggested Citation

  • Matthias Hild, 2004. "The instability of robust aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 23(2), pages 207-227, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:23:y:2004:i:2:p:207-227
    DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0248-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-003-0248-4
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00355-003-0248-4?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 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. Saralees Nadarajah, 2009. "The Pareto optimality distribution," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 43(6), pages 993-998, November.

    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:23:y:2004:i:2:p:207-227. 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.