Behavioral Social Choice
Behavioral Social Choice
Bernard Grofman, University of California, Irvine
A. A. J. Marley, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Ilia Tsetlin, Duke University, North Carolina
Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings.
- Challenges existing wisdom (stemming from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem) that democratic decision-making is inherently flawed
- Close link between theory and empirical applications, including data on real-world elections in US and Europe
- New mathematical tools to estimate majority rule relationship from sample data
Product details
No date availablePaperback
9780521536660
258 pages
229 × 152 × 14 mm
0.38kg
8 tables
Table of Contents
- Part I. Probabilistic Models of Social Choice Behavior:
- 1. The lack of theoretical and practical support for majority cycles
- 2. A general concept of majority rule
- Part II. Applications of Probabilistic Models to Empirical Data:
- 3. On the model dependence versus robustness of social choice results
- 4. Constructing majority preferences from subset choice data
- Part III. A General Statistical Sampling and Bayesian Inference Framework:
- 5. Majority rule in a statistical sampling and Bayesian inference framework
- 6. Conclusions and directions for future behavioral social choice research.
