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The half-win set and the geometry of spatial voting games

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Abstract

In the spatial context, when preferences can be characterized by circular indifference curves, we show that we can derive all the information about the majority preference relationship in a space from the win-set of any single point. Furthermore, the size of win sets increases for points along any ray outward from a central point in the space, the point that is the center of the yolk. To prove these results we employ a useful new geometric construction, the half-win set. The implication of these results is that embedding choice in a continuous n-dimensional space imposes great constraints on the nature of the majority-preference relationship.

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The listing of authors is alphabetical. We are indebted to the staff of the Word Processing Center, School of Social Sciences, UCI, for typing earlier drafts of this manuscript, to Cheryl Larsson for preparing the figures, and to Dorothy Gormick for bibliographic assistance. This research was partially supported by NSF Grant #SES 85-06397, Program in Management Sciences, awarded to the second-named author.

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Feld, S.L., Grofman, B. The half-win set and the geometry of spatial voting games. Public Choice 70, 245–250 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00124487

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