Abstract
A sufficient condition is derived for a policy y to be a Condorcet winner, when the set of feasible policies is some subsety ofR N with non-empty interior. Voters are assumed to differ in some scalar characteristic w. The sufficient condition refers only to voters' preferences over the set of preferred policies (of the various other voters). This set is a one-dimensional curve inR N> . The condition is that the indifference curves of each typew through the preferred policyy * (v) of any typev all be collinear. If the condition holds, then the preferred policyy * (m) of the median type of voter will be a Condorcet winner. If there are only three types of voter, then the above condition is also necessary for the existence of a Condorcet winner.
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This paper is a revision of the first part of my earlier “Majority Rule with Multidimensional Economic Choices”. I thank Ted Bergstrom, David Donaldson, and Greg Dow for very valuable comments on versions of that earlier paper, without implicating them in this current incarnation.
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Bucovetsky, S. Majority rule in multi-dimensional spatial models. Soc Choice Welfare 7, 353–368 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01376283
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01376283