A Graphical Analysis of Some Basic Results in Social Choice / Estelle Cantillon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cantillon, Estelle.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Technical Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. t0268.

NBER technical working paper series no. t0268

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2001.

Summary:

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on the robustness of Majority Rule due to Maskin (1995). In each case, geometry provides new insights on the working and interplay of the axioms, and suggests new results including a new characterization of the entire class of Majority Rule SWFs, a strengthening of May's Theorem, and a new version of Maskin's Theorem.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2001.