IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fda/fdaddt/2008-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Measurement of Consensus: An Axiomatic Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Jorge Alcalde-Unzu
  • Marc Vorsatz

Abstract

The cohesion of a society depends to large extend on the degree to which its members coincide in their preferences (the consensus). This paper proposes axioms a consensus measure should satisfy from a normative point of view and characterizes first a class of linear and additive measures which fulfills an ordinal property similar to the concepts of first order stochastic dominance in the literature on individual decision making under risk and Lorenz curve domination in the literature on income inequality measurement. With the help of some additional properties, it is then possible to isolate from this broad class of measures a subfamily that only depends on a single parameter. Finally, we show that the consensus measures associated with the focal parameters of this subfamily have an intuitive explanation and we characterize them separately.

Suggested Citation

  • Jorge Alcalde-Unzu & Marc Vorsatz, 2008. "The Measurement of Consensus: An Axiomatic Analysis," Working Papers 2008-28, FEDEA.
  • Handle: RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2008-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/dt/2008/dt-2008-28.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Esteban, Joan & Ray, Debraj, 1994. "On the Measurement of Polarization," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 62(4), pages 819-851, July.
    2. Wade D. Cook & Lawrence M. Seiford, 1982. "On the Borda-Kendall Consensus Method for Priority Ranking Problems," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(6), pages 621-637, June.
    3. Wade D. Cook & Lawrence M. Seiford, 1978. "Priority Ranking and Consensus Formation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 24(16), pages 1721-1732, December.
    4. Atkinson, Anthony B., 1970. "On the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 2(3), pages 244-263, September.
    5. Michael Rothschild & Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1969. "Increasing Risk: A Definition and Its Economic Consequences," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 275, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    6. Christian Klamler, 2008. "A distance measure for choice functions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 30(3), pages 419-425, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J.C.R. Alcantud & R. de Andrés Calle & J.M. Cascón, 2013. "Consensus and the Act of Voting," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 1(1), pages 1-22, June.
    2. Can, Burak & Ozkes, Ali Ihsan & Storcken, Ton, 2015. "Measuring polarization in preferences," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 76-79.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jorge Alcalde-Unzu & Marc Vorsatz, 2013. "Measuring the cohesiveness of preferences: an axiomatic analysis," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(4), pages 965-988, October.
    2. Jorge Alcalde-Unzu & Marc Vorsatz, 2016. "Do we agree? Measuring the cohesiveness of preferences," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 80(2), pages 313-339, February.
    3. J.C.R. Alcantud & R. de Andrés Calle & J.M. Cascón, 2013. "Consensus and the Act of Voting," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 1(1), pages 1-22, June.
    4. Jo Thori Lind & Karl Moene, 2011. "Miserly Developments," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(9), pages 1332-1352, June.
    5. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Sarkar, Palash, 2022. "A synthesis of local and effective tax progressivity measurement," MPRA Paper 115180, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, 2003. "Convergence Club Empirics: Some Dynamics and Explanations of Unequal Growth across Indian States," WIDER Working Paper Series DP2003-77, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    7. Clark, Andrew E. & D'Ambrosio, Conchita, 2014. "Attitudes to Income Inequality: Experimental and Survey Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 8136, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Andrea Aveni & Ludovico Crippa & Giulio Principi, 2024. "On the Weighted Top-Difference Distance: Axioms, Aggregation, and Approximation," Papers 2403.15198, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.
    9. Cascón, J.M. & González-Arteaga, T. & de Andrés Calle, R., 2019. "Reaching social consensus family budgets: The Spanish case," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 28-41.
    10. Paul Gregg & Jonathan Wadsworth, 2008. "Two sides to every story: measuring polarization and inequality in the distribution of work," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 171(4), pages 857-875, October.
    11. Labeaga, José M. & Molina, José Alberto & Navarro Paniagua, Maria, 2007. "Income Satisfaction and Deprivation in Spain," IZA Discussion Papers 2702, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    12. Satya R. Chakravarty & Amita Majumder & Sonali Roy, 2007. "A Treatment Of Absolute Indices Of Polarization," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 58(2), pages 273-293, June.
    13. Maria Molnar, 2010. "Measuring the impact of redistribution on income inequality and polarization," Annals - Economy Series, Constantin Brancusi University, Faculty of Economics, vol. 4, pages 7-27, December.
    14. Maria Livia ŞTEFĂNESCU, 2015. "Analyzing the health status of the population using ordinal data," Computational Methods in Social Sciences (CMSS), "Nicolae Titulescu" University of Bucharest, Faculty of Economic Sciences, vol. 3(1), pages 18-24, June.
    15. Peter Lambert, 2010. "James Foster and Michael Wolfson’s 1992 paper “Polarization and the decline of the middle class”," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 8(2), pages 241-245, June.
    16. Kelin Luo & Yinfeng Xu & Bowen Zhang & Huili Zhang, 2018. "Creating an acceptable consensus ranking for group decision making," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 36(1), pages 307-328, July.
    17. Quah, Danny T, 1996. "Convergence Empirics across Economies with (Some) Capital Mobility," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 95-124, March.
    18. Allanson, Paul, 2014. "Income stratification and the measurement of interdistributional inequality between multiple groups," SIRE Discussion Papers 2015-34, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE).
    19. Joep Burger & Jacqueline Beuningen, 2020. "Measuring well-being dispersion on discrete rating scales," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 149(3), pages 749-773, June.
    20. Alexander Sohn, 2015. "Beyond Conventional Wage Discrimination Analysis: Assessing Comprehensive Wage Distributions of Males and Females Using Structured Additive Distributional Regression," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 802, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2008-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carmen Arias (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.fedea.net .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.