Demystifying the 'Metric Approach to Social Compromise with the Unanimity Criterion'

In a recent book and earlier studies, Donald Saari well clarifies the source of three classical impossibility theorems in social choice and proposes possible escape out of these negative results. The objective of this note is to illustrate the relevance of these explanations in justifying the metric approach to the social compromise with the unanimity criterion.social choice, impossibility theorems, metric approach to compromise with the unanimity criterion

The performance of four possible rules for selecting the Prime Minister after the Dutch Parliamentary elections of June 2010

Economic policy depends not only on national elections but also on coalition bargaining strategies. In coalition government, minority parties bargain on policy and form a majority coalition, and select a Prime Minister from their mids. In Holland the latter is done conventionally with Plurality, so that the largest party provides the chair of the cabinet. Alternative methods are Condorcet, Borda or Borda Fixed Point. Since the role of the Prime Minister is to be above all parties and represent the nation and to be there for all citizens, it would enhance democracy and likely be optimal if the potential Prime Minister is selected from all parties and at the start of the bargaining process. The performance of the four selection rules is evaluated using the results of the 2010 Dutch Parliamentary elections. The impossibility theorem by Kenneth Arrow (Nobel memorial prize in economics 1972) finds a crucially different interpretation.Political economy; public choice; political science; optimal representation; electoral systems; elections; coalition; impossibility theorem

Book Review

This review of Leo Katz\u27s book, Why the Law is So Perverse, addresses three questions. First, does Katz draw the appropriate normative conclusions about legal perversities based on their connections to social choice theory? In other words, what are the legal ethics and professionalism implications of his book? Second, how does each of the legal perversities in the book follow from a particular social choice theory result? In other words, what is the precise theoretical connection between each of the legal perversities discussed and an impossibility theorem in social choice theory? Third, can we reinterpret our understanding of the seemingly dismal and negative impossibility theorems from social choice in a constructive and positive way to suggest how society can make the best of legal perversities? In other words, what are benign interpretations and positive versions of the social choice impossibility theorems and their implications for how society can deal with what Katz calls legal perversities

Review of Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Professor Dean Spade reviews Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

The Realpolitik of Economic Welfare: Observations on Democracy, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and The Paretian Liberal Paradox in the Indian Context

This paper begins by painting the socio-political and economic map of Indian democracy in 2008. Accordingly, the paper posits six basic positions and six argumentative premises. Cataloguing a series of economic issues the paper clearly states that the twin evils of uneven distribution of income, wealth and opportunity on the one hand and the unequal development of peoples, sectors and regions on the other continued to plague Indian planners sixty one years after the country got rid of its colonial yolk. It attempts to explain the impossibility theorem of Arrow, the optimality issues of Pareto and Sen's liberal paradox. In the process, it tables a realpolitik of welfare in Indian conditions and takes the candid position that rational choice for voters in a multi-party parliamentary democracy is just not possible. Hence, the right candidates may never be elected. If the threshold of welfare is to be raised and the quality of life is to improve, the paper argues, India must ideally though not necessarily move from parliamentary system to a possible and preferred presidential form of democracy. However, for the greater good of the country the system must move from multi-party to a three party democracy. If not, regional and smaller parties will fragment people power and our democratic system will lack the muscle required to bring about sustained developmental growth. No claim of any epistemological breakthrough is made in the paper except that the author has taken well-accepted views of Arrow, Pareto, Sen and others to analyse the present form of democracy in India. Keywords: Indian Democracy, Arrow, Sen, Impossibility, Pareto Optimality, Monotonicit

The importance of social learning for non-market valuation

Neoclassical valuation methods often measure the contribution that non-market goods make to utility as income compensations. This circumvents Arrow's impossibility (AI) –a theoretical proof establishing the impossibility of social preferences – but those methods cannot be used in all settings. We build on Arrow's original proof,showing that with two additional axioms that allow for social learning, a second round of preference elicitation with a social announcement after the first, generates logically consistent social preferences. In short: deliberation leads to convergence. A ‘web-game’ aligning with this is trialed to select real world projects, in a deliberative way, with the board of an Australian Aboriginal Corporation. Analysis of the data collected in the trial validates our theory; our test for convergence is statistically significant at the 1% level. Our results also suggest complex social goods are relatively undervalued without deliberation. Most non-market valuation methods could be easily adapted to facilitate social learnin

Design decisions: concordance of designers and effects of the Arrow’s theorem on the collective preference ranking

The problem of collective decision by design teams has received considerable attention in the scientific literature of engineering design. A much debated problem is that in which multiple designers formulate their individual preference rankings of different design alternatives and these rankings should be aggregated into a collective one. This paper focuses the attention on three basic research questions: (i) “How can the degree of concordance of designer rankings be measured?”, (ii) “For a given set of designer rankings, which aggregation model provides the most coherent solution?”, and (iii) “To what extent is the collective ranking influenced by the aggregation model in use?”. The aim of this paper is to present a novel approach that addresses the above questions in a relatively simple and agile way. A detailed description of the methodology is supported by a practical application to a real-life case study