We construct models of group formation designed to capture some of the key features of political and social competition. The models draw on the ‘citizen candidate’ approach and allow competition to be modelled as either compromise where all groups in‡uence outcomes; or con‡ict where one group wins the right to dictate. We also consider both instrumental and expressive approaches to understandin...

Domains of generalized single-peaked preferences are classified in terms of the extent to which they enable well-behaved strategy-proof social choice. Generalizing the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, we characterize the domains that admit non-dictatorial strategy-proof social choice functions. We also provide characterizations of the domains that enable locally non-dictatorial, anonymous, and ne...

This paper considers the functioning approach to the standard of living. It shows that, in evaluating standards of living, one is faced with deep-rooted tensions between the principle of minimal relativism, which requires some minimal respect for differences between the evaluations of different individuals and/or the differences between the norms of different communities, and the principle of d...

Feasible elimination procedures (Peleg, 1978) play a central role in constructing social choice functions which have the following property: in the associated game form, for any preference profile there exists a strong Nash equilibrium resulting in the sincere outcome. In this paper we provide an axiomatic characterization of the social choice correspondence resulting from applying feasible eli...

Many public goods that are provided by coalitions have a group-size e¤ect. Namely, people prefer to consume a public good in a larger coalition. This paper studies local public goods games with anonymous and separable group-size e¤ect. The core is nonempty when coalition feasible sets are monotonic and players’preferences over public goods satisfy a condition called cardinal connectedness. More...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of deÞning social preferences over distributions of a Þxed bundle of divisible goods. The paper follows an approach to preference aggregation which relies only on interpersonally non-comparable preferences, and circumvents Arrow’s impossibility by taking account of the shape of indifference ...

We reconsider the problem of aggregating individual preference orderings into a single social ordering when alternatives are lotteries and individual preferences are of the von Neumann-Morgenstern type. Relative egalitarianism ranks alternatives by applying the leximin ordering to the distributions of (0-1) normalized utilities they generate. We propose an axiomatic characterization of this agg...

We show that feasible elimination procedures (Peleg, 1978) can be used to select k from m alternatives. An important advantage of this method is the core property: no coalition can guarantee an outcome that is preferred by all its members. We also show that the problem of determining whether a specific k-tuple can result from a feasible elimination procedure is computationally equivalent to the...