IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-05074827.html

Is the preference of the majority representative ?
[La préférence de la majorité est-elle représentative ?]

Author

Listed:
  • Mihir Bhattacharya

    (Ashoka University)

  • Nicolas Gravel

    (AMU - Aix Marseille Université, AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

We show that a majoritarian relation is, among all conceivable binary relations, the most representative of the profile of preferences from which it emanates. We define ''the most representative'' to mean that it minimizes the sum of distances between itself and the preferences in the profile for a given distance function. We identify a necessary and sufficient condition for such a distance to always be minimized by a majoritarian relation. This condition requires the distance to be additive with respect to a plausible notion of compromise between preferences. The well-known Kemeny distance does satisfy this property, along with many others. All distances that satisfy this property can be written as a sum of strictly positive weights assigned to the ordered pairs of alternatives by which any two preferences differ.

Suggested Citation

  • Mihir Bhattacharya & Nicolas Gravel, 2021. "Is the preference of the majority representative ? [La préférence de la majorité est-elle représentative ?]," Post-Print hal-05074827, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05074827
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05074827v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-05074827v1/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Hiroki Nishimura & Efe A. Ok, 2023. "Best Complete Approximations of Preference Relations," Papers 2311.06641, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    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:hal:journl:hal-05074827. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.