Abstract
Duncan Black (1948) and Kenneth Arrow (1963) raised the key question of collective choice: if people have different preferences for policy outcomes are there general mechanisms that can (always) aggregate those preferences in consistent and coherent ways? The answer is ‘no’. Starting from simple premises involving individual transitivity, aggregate Pareto optimality and non-dictatorship there is no collective choice mechanism that yields a socially transitive outcome. Such a finding is startling given the confidence placed in democratic institutions that rely on voting mechanisms to choose a single outcome from many possible outcomes.
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Wilson, R.K. (2010). collective choice experiments. In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds) Behavioural and Experimental Economics. The New Palgrave Economics Collection. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280786_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280786_8
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