A note on extended stable sets

Contains fulltext : 160073pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)We study abstract decision problems by introducing an extended dominance relation with respect to a set of alternatives. This extension is in between the traditional dominance relation as formulated by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (Theory of games and economic behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1944) and the transitive closure of it. Subsequently, stable sets are defined and studied for this extended relation. We formulate a characterization of stable sets for this relation and an existence theorem. Finally, we discuss its relation with Von Neumann–Morgenstern stable sets and generalized stable sets.12 april 201

Preference aggregation theory without acyclicity: The core without majority dissatisfaction

Acyclicity of individual preferences is a minimal assumption in social choice theory. We replace that assumption by the direct assumption that preferences have maximal elements on a fixed agenda. We show that the core of a simple game is nonempty for all profiles of such preferences if and only if the number of alternatives in the agenda is less than the Nakamura number of the game. The same is true if we replace the core by the core without majority dissatisfaction, obtained by deleting from the agenda all the alternatives that are non-maximal for all players in a winning coalition. Unlike the core, the core without majority dissatisfaction depends only on the players' sets of maximal elements and is included in the union of such sets. A result for an extended framework gives another sense in which the core without majority dissatisfaction behaves better than the core.Comment: 27+3 page

The Banks set and the Uncovered Set in budget allocation problems

We examine how a society chooses to divide a given budget among various regions, projects or individuals. In particular, we characterize the Banks set and the Uncovered Set in such problems. We show that the two sets can be proper subsets of the set of all alternatives, and at times are very pointed in their predictions. This contrasts with well-known "chaos theorems," which suggest that majority voting does not lead to any meaningful predictions when the policy space is multidimensional