Characterization of self-selective social choice functions on the tops-only domain

Self-selectivity is a new kind of consistency pertaining to social choice rules. It deals with the problem of whether a social choice rule selects itself from among other rival such rules when a society is also to choose the choice rule that it will employ in making its choice from a given set of alternatives. Koray shows that a neutral and unanimous social choice function is universally self-selective if and only if it is dictatorial. In this paper, we confine the available social choice functions to the tops-only domain and examine whether such restriction allow us to escape the dictatoriality result. A neutral, unanimous, and tops-only social choice function, however, turns out to be self-selective relative to the tops-only domain if and only if it is top-monotonic, and thus again dictatorial

"A Characterization of the Plurality Rule"

We consider an axiomatic characterization of the plurality rule, which selects the alternative(s) most preferred by the largest number of individuals. We strengthen the characterization result of Yeh (Economic Theory 34: 575{583, 2008) by replacing effciency axiom by the weaker axiom called faithfulness . Formally, we show that the plurality rule is the only rule satisfying anonymity, neutrality, reinforcement, tops-only , and faithfulness .

Self-Selective Social Choice Functions

It is not uncommon that a society facing a choice problem has also to choose the choice rule itself. In such situation voters’ preferences on alternatives induce preferences over the voting rules. Such a setting immediately gives rise to a natural question concerning consistency between these two levels of choice. If a choice rule employed to resolve the society’s original choice problem does not choose itself when it is also used in choosing the choice rule, then this phenomenon can be regarded as inconsistency of this choice rule as it rejects itself according to its own rationale. Koray (2000) proved that the only neutral, unanimous universally self-selective social choice functions are the dictatorial ones. Here we in troduce to our society a constitution, which rules out inefficient social choice rules. When inefficient social choice rules become unavailable for comparison, the property of self-selectivity becomes weaker and we show that some non-trivial self-selective social choice functions do exist. Under certain assumptions on the constitution we describe all of them

Universally selection-closed families of social choice functions

Ankara : The Department of Economics, Bilkent University, 2009.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2009.Includes bibliographical references leaves 22.In this thesis, we introduce a new notion of consistency for families of social choice functions, called selection-closedness. This concept requires that every member of a family of social choice functions that are to be employed by a society to make its choice from an alternative set it faces, should choose a member of the given family, when it is also employed to choose the social choice function itself in the presence of other rival such functions along with the members of the initial family. We show that a proper subset of neutral social choice functions is universally selection-closed if and only if it is a subset of the set of dictatorial and anti-dictatorial social choice functions. Finally, we introduce a weaker version of selection-closedness and conclude that a “rightextendable scoring correspondence” is strict if and only if the set consisting of its singleton valued refinements is universally weakly selection-closed.Şenocak, TalatM.S

Measuring self-selectivity via generalized Condorcet rules

Ankara : The Department of Economics, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2011.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2011.Includes bibliographical references leaves 29.In this thesis, we introduce a method to measure self-selectivity of social choice functions. Due to Koray [2000], a neutral and unanimous social choice function is known to be universally self-selective if and only if it is dictatorial. Therefore, in this study, we confine our set of test social choice functions to particular singleton-valued refinements of generalized Condorcet rules. We show that there are some non-dictatorial self-selective social choice functions. Moreover, we define the notion of self-selectivity degree which enables us to compare social choice functions according to the strength of their selfselectivities. We conclude that the family of generalized Condorcet functions is an appropriate set of test social choice functions when we localize the notion of self-selectivity.Altuntaş, AçelyaM.S

On the stability of a scoring rules set under the IAC

A society facing a choice problem has also to choose the voting rule itself from a set of different possible voting rules. In such situations, the consequentialism property allows us to induce voters\u27 preferences on voting rules from preferences over alternatives. A voting rule employed to resolve the society\u27s choice problem is self-selective if it chooses itself when it is also used in choosing the voting rule. A voting rules set is said to be stable if it contains at least one self-selective voting rule at each profile of preferences on voting rules. We consider in this paper a society which will make a choice from a set constituted by three alternatives {a, b, c} and a set of the three well-known scoring voting rules {Borda, Plurality, Antiplurality}. Under the Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption (IAC), we will derive a probability for the stability of this triplet of voting rules. We use Ehrhart polynomials in order to solve our problems. This method counts the number of lattice points inside a convex bounded polyhedron (polytope). We discuss briefly recent algorithmic solutions to this method and use it to determine the probability of stabillity of {Borda, Plurality, Antiplurality} set

Hyper-Stable Social Welfare Functions

We introduce a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyperstability. A social welfare function a selects a complete weak order from a profile PN of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives, given N individuals. Each linear order P in PN generates a linear order over orders of alternatives,called hyper-preference, by means of a preference extension. Hence each profile PN generates a hyper-profile ˙PN. We assume that all preference extensions are separable: the hyper-preference of some order P ranks order Q above order Q0 if the set of alternative pairs P and Q agree on contains the one P and Q0 agree on. A special sub-class of separable extensions contains all Kemeny extensions, which build hyper-preferences by using the Kemeny distance criterion. A social welfare function a is hyper-stable (resp. Kemeny-stable) if at any profile PN, at least one linearization of a(PN) is ranked first by a( ˙PN), where ˙PN is any separable (resp. Kemeny) hyper-profile induced from PN. We show that no scoring rule is hyper-stable, and that no unanimous scoring rule is Kemeny-stable, while there exists a hyper-stable Condorcet social welfare function

Cloning-proof social choice correspondences

Ankara : The Department of Economics, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2011.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2011.Includes bibliographical references leaves 27-28.In this thesis study, we provide axiomatic characterizations of the well-known Condorcet and Plurality rules via consistency axioms when the alternative set is endogeneous, namely hereditariness and cloning-proofness. Cloningproofness is the requirement that the social choice rule be insensitive to the replication of alternatives, whereas hereditariness requires insensitivity to withdrawal of alternatives.Öztürk, Zeliha EmelM.S