Abstract
We present a new method of social choice. The result of our method coincides with that of majority voting when it does not produce an intransitivity among the alternatives under consideration. When majority voting would produce an intransitivity, our method orders the alternatives in the same way as the transitive constituency would whom the committee members are most likely to represent. Analysis of the application of our method to three alternatives shows that (a) the resulting order depends only on the committee members' votes between pairs of alternatives (b) the resulting order is less in conflict with Sen's Property α than the orders provided by other schemes (c) when majority voting provides an intransitivity, the hypothesis that, in fact, the committee's constituency is as we assume it to be is almost as likely as the hypothesis that it precisely mirrors the committee.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arrow, Kenneth J.: 1963, ‘Social Choice and Individual Values’, First Ed. New York: Wiley, 1951, 2nd Ed. New York: Wiley.
Black, Duncan: 1958, ‘The Theory of Committees and Elections’, London and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sen, Amartya K.: 1970, ‘Collective Choice and Social Welfare’, San Francisco: Holden-Day, Inc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wolsky, A.M., Sanathanan, L. The inferred referendum — A rule for committee decisions. Theor Decis 14, 75–88 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135145
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00135145