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

Hyper-stable social welfare functions

International audienceWe define a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyper-stability. A social welfare function (SWF) selects a weak order from a profile of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives. Each profile induces a profile of hyper-preferences, defined as linear orders over linear orders, in accordance with the betweenness criterion: the hyper-preference of some order P ranks order Q above order Q’ if the set of alternative pairs P and Q agree on contains the one P and Q’ agree on. A special sub-class of hyper-preferences satisfying betweenness is defined by using the Kemeny distance criterion. A neutral SWF is hyper-stable (resp. Kemeny-stable) if given any profile leading to the weak order R, at least one linear extension of R is ranked first when the SWF is applied to any hyper-preference profile induced by means of the betweenness (resp. Kemeny) criterion. We show that no scoring rule is hyper-stable, unless we restrict attention to the case of three alternatives. Moreover, no unanimous scoring rule is Kemeny-stable, while the transitive closure of the majority relation is hyper-stable. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 201