Abstract
This chapter focuses on Black’s Median Voter theorem which states that the median voter’s ideal alternative will be the socially preferred to other alternatives under majority rule when the following strict conditions hold: 1) all alternatives can be strictly ordered; 2) each voter strictly prefers one alternative to all other alternatives; and 3) each voter’s strict preferences decrease monotonically from that alternative. This chapter shows that when fuzzy strict, rather than purely strict, preferences are applied Black’s Median Voter theorem holds; but, it does not hold when fuzzy weak preferences are applied. However, a potential problem arises when using fuzzy strict preferences in cases where the maximal set, while not empty, may contain more alternatives than the median voter’s ideal alternative.
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Gibilisco, M.B., Gowen, A.M., Albert, K.E., Mordeson, J.N., Wierman, M.J., Clark, T.D. (2014). Fuzzy Black’s Median Voter Theorem. In: Fuzzy Social Choice Theory. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing, vol 315. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05176-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05176-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05175-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05176-5
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