Amendment Voting with Incomplete Preferences ∗

This paper studies the outcome of the amendment voting procedure based on a potentially incomplete binary relation. We assume that the decision-maker evaluates candidates in a list and iteratively updates her choice by comparing the status-quo to the next candidate. With a complete binary relation, it is known that the final selected candidate belongs to the “top cycle.” In reality however, not all pairs of candidates are directly comparable. To accommodate this concern, we allow for any transitive binary relations and suppose that the DM favors the status-quo whenever incomparability arises. Our main contribution under this general framework is to characterize all mappings from lists to final votes that are consistent with the amendment procedure. We also discuss to what extent the underlying preference can be recovered from observed votes. JEL Classification: D11