IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/roc/wallis/wp51.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rationalizable Voting

Author

Abstract

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions in order for a finite number of binary voting choices to be consistent with the hypothesis that voters have preferences that admit concave utility representations. When the location of the voting alternatives is known, we apply these conditions in order to derive simple, nontrivial testable restrictions on the location of voters’ ideal points, and in order to predict individual voting behavior. If, on the other hand, the location of voting alternatives is unrestricted then voting decisions impose no testable restrictions on the joint location of voter ideal points, even if the space of alternatives is one dimensional. Furthermore, two dimensions are always sufficient to represent or fold the voting records of any number of voters while endowing all these voters with strictly concave preferences and arbitrary ideal points. The analysis readily generalizes to choice situations over any finite sets of alternatives.

Suggested Citation

  • Tasos Kalandrakis, 2008. "Rationalizable Voting," Wallis Working Papers WP51, University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
  • Handle: RePEc:roc:wallis:wp51
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.wallis.rochester.edu/WallisPapers/wallis_51.pdf
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: None
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Varian, Hal R, 1982. "The Nonparametric Approach to Demand Analysis," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 945-973, July.
    2. Forges, Françoise & Minelli, Enrico, 2009. "Afriat's theorem for general budget sets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(1), pages 135-145, January.
    3. James C. Cox & Daniel Friedman & Vjollca Sadiraj, 2008. "Revealed Altruism," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 76(1), pages 31-69, January.
    4. Jean-Paul Chavas & Thomas L. Cox, 1993. "On Generalized Revealed Preference Analysis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 108(2), pages 493-506.
    5. Kannai, Yakar, 1977. "Concavifiability and constructions of concave utility functions," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 1-56, March.
    6. Clinton, Joshua D. & Meirowitz, Adam, 2001. "Agenda Constrained Legislator Ideal Points and the Spatial Voting Model," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(3), pages 242-259, January.
    7. Arianna Degan & Antonio Merlo, 2006. "Do Voters Vote Sincerely?," PIER Working Paper Archive 06-008, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania.
    8. Yakar Kannai, 2005. "Remarks concerning concave utility functions on finite sets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 26(2), pages 333-344, August.
    9. Matzkin, Rosa L. & Richter, Marcel K., 1991. "Testing strictly concave rationality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 53(2), pages 287-303, April.
    10. Bogomolnaia, Anna & Laslier, Jean-Francois, 2007. "Euclidean preferences," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 87-98, February.
    11. Chambers, Christopher P. & Echenique, Federico, 2009. "Supermodularity and preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 1004-1014, May.
    12. Richter, Marcel K. & Wong, K.-C.Kam-Chau, 2004. "Concave utility on finite sets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 115(2), pages 341-357, April.
    13. Tasos Kalandrakis, 2006. "Roll Call Data and Ideal Points," Wallis Working Papers WP42, University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
    14. Matzkin, Rosa L, 1991. "Axioms of Revealed Preference for Nonlinear Choice Sets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(6), pages 1779-1786, 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. Marc Henry & Ismael Mourifié, 2013. "Euclidean Revealed Preferences: Testing The Spatial Voting Model," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(4), pages 650-666, June.
    2. Eguia, Jon X., 2011. "Foundations of spatial preferences," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(2), pages 200-205, March.
    3. Andrei Gomberg, 2011. "Vote Revelation: Empirical Characterization of Scoring Rules," Working Papers 1102, Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM.
    4. Hiroki Nishimura & Efe A. Ok & John K.-H. Quah, 2017. "A Comprehensive Approach to Revealed Preference Theory," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(4), pages 1239-1263, April.
    5. Azrieli, Yaron, 2011. "Axioms for Euclidean preferences with a valence dimension," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(4-5), pages 545-553.
    6. Heufer, Jan, 2013. "Quasiconcave preferences on the probability simplex: A nonparametric analysis," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 21-30.
    7. Jinhui H. Bai & Roger Lagunoff, 2013. "Revealed Political Power," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1085-1115, November.
    8. Mikhail Freer & César Martinelli, 2023. "An algebraic approach to revealed preference," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 75(3), pages 717-742, April.
    9. , P. & ,, 2014. "On the consistency of data with bargaining theories," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 9(1), January.
    10. Andrei Gomberg, 2018. "Revealed votes," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(2), pages 281-296, August.
    11. Nikolaos Argyris & Alec Morton & José Rui Figueira, 2014. "CUT: A Multicriteria Approach for Concavifiable Preferences," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 62(3), pages 633-642, June.
    12. Brian Duricy, 2023. "Preferences on Ranked-Choice Ballots," Papers 2301.02697, arXiv.org.

    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. Cherchye, Laurens & Demuynck, Thomas & De Rock, Bram, 2014. "Revealed preference analysis for convex rationalizations on nonlinear budget sets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 224-236.
    2. Christopher Connell & Eric Rasmusen, 2012. "Concavifying the Quasiconcave," Working Papers 2012-10, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
    3. Hiroki Nishimura & Efe A. Ok & John K.-H. Quah, 2017. "A Comprehensive Approach to Revealed Preference Theory," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(4), pages 1239-1263, April.
    4. Polisson, Matthew & Renou, Ludovic, 2016. "Afriat’s Theorem and Samuelson’s ‘Eternal Darkness’," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 36-40.
    5. Cherchye, Laurens & De Rock, Bram & Vermeulen, Frederic, 2010. "An Afriat Theorem for the collective model of household consumption," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(3), pages 1142-1163, May.
    6. Shiozawa, Kohei, 2016. "Revealed preference test and shortest path problem; graph theoretic structure of the rationalizability test," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 38-48.
    7. John Quah & Hiroki Nishimura & Efe A. Ok, 2013. "A Unified Approach to Revealed Preference Theory: The Case of Rational Choice," Economics Series Working Papers 686, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    8. Chambers, Christopher P. & Echenique, Federico & Shmaya, Eran, 2010. "On behavioral complementarity and its implications," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(6), pages 2332-2355, November.
    9. Apartsin, Yevgenia & Kannai, Yakar, 2006. "Demand properties of concavifiable preferences," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 36-55, December.
    10. Demuynck, Thomas & Hjertstrand, Per, 2019. "Samuelson's Approach to Revealed Preference Theory: Some Recent Advances," Working Paper Series 1274, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    11. Kohei Shiozawa, 2015. "Revealed Preference Test and Shortest Path Problem; Graph Theoretic Structure of the Rationalizability Test," Discussion Papers in Economics and Business 15-17-Rev.2, Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics, revised Aug 2016.
    12. Christopher P. Chambers & Federico Echenique & Nicolas S. Lambert, 2021. "Recovering Preferences From Finite Data," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(4), pages 1633-1664, July.
    13. Christopher P. Chambers & Federico Echenique & Nicolas S. Lambert, 2023. "Recovering utility," Papers 2301.11492, arXiv.org.
    14. Cesar Martinelli & Mikhail Freer, 2016. "General Revealed Preferences," Working Papers 1059, George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, revised Jun 2016.
    15. repec:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/5rkqqmvrn4tl22s9mc0o6ctj2 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Tasos Kalandrakis, 2006. "Roll Call Data and Ideal Points," Wallis Working Papers WP42, University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
    17. Ivar Ekeland & Alfred Galichon, 2013. "The housing problem and revealed preference theory: duality and an application," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 54(3), pages 425-441, November.
    18. repec:hal:wpaper:halshs-00870052 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Deb, Rahul & Fenske, James, 2009. "A Nonparametric Test of Strategic Behavior in the Cournot Model," MPRA Paper 16560, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/5rkqqmvrn4tl22s9mc0o6ctj2 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Forges, Françoise & Iehlé, Vincent, 2014. "Afriat’s theorem for indivisible goods," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 1-6.
    22. Ian Crawford & Bram De Rock, 2014. "Empirical Revealed Preference," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 503-524, August.
    23. Sam Cosaert & Thomas Demuynck, 2015. "Revealed preference theory for finite choice sets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 59(1), pages 169-200, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General

    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:roc:wallis:wp51. 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: Richard DiSalvo (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    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.