IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bge/wpaper/1508.html

Neutrality, Pairwise Justifiability and Serial Dictatorships

Author

Listed:
  • Dolors Berga
  • Bernardo Moreno
  • Pietro Salmanso

Abstract

We consider a society composed of a finite set of agents with preferences over a finite set of alternatives. We focus on collective choice correspondences which are rules assigning to each pair formed by agents' preferences and a subset of alternatives (an agenda), a chosen subset of the agenda. Our analysis centers on three properties: neutrality, strong pairwise justifiability, and strong decisiveness. Neutrality requires that no alternative is intrinsically favored over another. Strong pairwise justifiability demands that if an alternative x is selected in one situation but not in another, there must exist some other alternative z , present in both agendas, whose relative ranking with respect to x has improved for at least one agent. Strong decisiveness is a property that can be viewed as a particular type of resoluteness. Our main result establishes that serial dictatorships are the only collective choice correspondences defined on the universal domain and across all agendas satisfying neutrality, strong pairwise justifiability, and strong decisiveness.

Suggested Citation

  • Dolors Berga & Bernardo Moreno & Pietro Salmanso, 2025. "Neutrality, Pairwise Justifiability and Serial Dictatorships," Working Papers 1508, Barcelona School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bge:wpaper:1508
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bw.bse.esgallapre3.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/1508-1.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Priscilla Man & Shino Takayama, 2013. "A unifying impossibility theorem," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 54(2), pages 249-271, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Ning Neil Yu, 2013. "A one-shot proof of Arrow’s theorem and the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 1(2), pages 145-149, November.
    2. Priscilla Man & Shino Takayama, 2013. "A Unifying Impossibility Theorem for Compact Metricsocial Alternatives Space," Discussion Papers Series 477, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    3. Uuganbaatar Ninjbat, 2015. "Impossibility theorems are modified and unified," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 45(4), pages 849-866, December.
    4. Louis Anthony (Tony) Cox, 2015. "Overcoming Learning Aversion in Evaluating and Managing Uncertain Risks," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 35(10), pages 1892-1910, October.
    5. Cato, Susumu, 2017. "Unanimity, anonymity, and infinite population," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 28-35.
    6. Ning Yu, 2015. "A quest for fundamental theorems of social choice," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 44(3), pages 533-548, March.
    7. Shino Takayama & Akira Yokotani, 2014. "Serial Dictatorship with Infinitely Many Agents," Discussion Papers Series 503, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    8. Matías Núñez, 2014. "The strategic sincerity of Approval voting," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(1), pages 157-189, May.
    9. Muto, Nozomu & Sato, Shin, 2016. "Bounded response of aggregated preferences," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 1-15.
    10. Brendan Markey-Towler, 2016. "Economics cannot isolate itself from political theory: a mathematical demonstration," Papers 1701.06410, arXiv.org.
    11. 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.
    12. Dougherty, Keith L. & Heckelman, Jac C., 2020. "The probability of violating Arrow’s conditions," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    13. Bossert, Walter & Cato, Susumu, 2021. "Superset-robust collective choice rules," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 126-136.
    14. Nanyang Bu, 2016. "Joint misrepresentation with bribes," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 61(1), pages 115-125, January.
    15. Paul Frijters & Benno Torgler & Brendan Markey-Towler, 2016. "On the Problem of Constructing Rational Preferences," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 92, pages 68-82, June.
    16. Susumu Cato, 2019. "The possibility of Paretian anonymous decision-making with an infinite population," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 53(4), pages 587-601, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:bge:wpaper:1508. 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: Bruno Guallar (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bargses.html .

    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.