Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategyproofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters’preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal ‡exibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight. JEL classi…cation : D70