IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v157y2013i1p145-168.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Elections with partially ordered preferences

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Ackerman
  • Sul-Young Choi
  • Peter Coughlin
  • Eric Gottlieb
  • Japheth Wood

Abstract

Suppose an organization has a committee with multiple seats, and the committee members are to be elected by a group of voters. For the organization, the possible alternatives are the possible sets of individuals who could serve together. A common approach is to choose from among these alternatives by having each voter cast separate votes on the candidates for each seat. When this type of ballot is used, important characteristics of the set of individuals on the committee (such as what percentage of the members will be female) might not be explicitly considered by the voters. Another approach that has been used is to have each voter cast a ballot which ranks all possible sets of members. However, this approach can require the voters to weigh a relatively large number of alternatives. This paper considers group decisions where it is desirable to: (1) explicitly consider characteristics of alternatives and (2) have a relatively small number of options upon which a voter has to express his preferences. The approach that we propose has two steps: First voters vote directly on pertinent characteristics of alternatives; Then these votes are used to indirectly specify preferences on alternatives. The indirectly specified preferences are ones that are naturally modeled using partially ordered sets. We identify some specific methods that could be applied in the second step. In addition, by replacing the indirectly specified preferences in a suitable way, we suggest a technique that can use any positional, pairwise, or other voting method that accepts totally (or “completely”) ordered inputs to tally ballots. We also describe another way to potentially compute pairwise rankings from partially ordered alternatives and discuss some practical and theoretical difficulties associated with our approach. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2013

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Ackerman & Sul-Young Choi & Peter Coughlin & Eric Gottlieb & Japheth Wood, 2013. "Elections with partially ordered preferences," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 157(1), pages 145-168, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:157:y:2013:i:1:p:145-168
    DOI: 10.1007/s11127-012-9930-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-012-9930-3
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11127-012-9930-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Steven J. Brams, 1990. "Constrained Approval Voting: A Voting System to Elect a Governing Board," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 20(5), pages 67-80, October.
    2. Saari,Donald G., 2001. "Decisions and Elections," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521004046, January.
    3. Duncan Black, 1976. "Partial justification of the Borda count," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 28(1), pages 1-15, December.
    4. Merlin, Vincent & Valognes, Fabrice, 2004. "The impact of indifferent voters on the likelihood of some voting paradoxes," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(3), pages 343-361, November.
    5. Merlin, Vincent R. & Saari, Donald G., 1997. "Copeland Method II: Manipulation, Monotonicity, and Paradoxes," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 148-172, January.
    6. Peter Fishburn, 1973. "On the construction of weak orders from fragmentary information," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 38(4), pages 459-472, December.
    7. Vincent R. Merlin & Donald G. Saari, "undated". "The Copeland Method I; Relationships and the Dictionary," Discussion Papers 1111, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science.
    8. Michael Taylor, 1968. "Graph-theoretic approaches to the theory of social choice," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 35-47, March.
    9. Bassett, Gilbert W, Jr & Persky, Joseph, 1999. "Robust Voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 99(3-4), pages 299-310, June.
    10. Fuad Aleskerov & Denis Bouyssou & Bernard Monjardet, 2007. "Utility Maximization, Choice and Preference," Springer Books, Springer, edition 0, number 978-3-540-34183-3, January.
    11. Saari,Donald G., 2001. "Decisions and Elections," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521808163, January.
    12. Joseph Kadane, 1972. "On division of the question," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 47-54, September.
    13. Donald G. Saari & Vincent R. Merlin, 1996. "The Copeland method (*)," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 8(1), pages 51-76.
    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. Terzopoulou, Zoi & Endriss, Ulle, 2021. "The Borda class," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 31-40.

    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. Channing Arndt & Azhar M. Hussain & Vincenzo Salvucci & Finn Tarp & Lars Peter Østerdal, 2016. "Poverty Mapping Based on First‐Order Dominance with an Example from Mozambique," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(1), pages 3-21, January.
    2. Aki Lehtinen, 2007. "The Borda rule is also intended for dishonest men," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 133(1), pages 73-90, October.
    3. Channing Arndt & Azhar M. Hussain & Vincenzo Salvucci & Finn Tarp & Lars Peter Østerdal, 2016. "Poverty Mapping Based on First‐Order Dominance with an Example from Mozambique," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(1), pages 3-21, January.
    4. Josep Colomer, 2013. "Ramon Llull: from ‘Ars electionis’ to social choice theory," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 40(2), pages 317-328, February.
    5. Diana Cheng & Peter Coughlin, 2017. "Using equations from power indices to analyze figure skating teams," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 170(3), pages 231-251, March.
    6. Christian Klamler, 2005. "On the Closeness Aspect of Three Voting Rules: Borda – Copeland – Maximin," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 233-240, May.
    7. Giora Slutzki & Oscar Volij, 2006. "Scoring of web pages and tournaments—axiomatizations," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 26(1), pages 75-92, January.
    8. Kamwa, Eric & Merlin, Vincent, 2015. "Scoring rules over subsets of alternatives: Consistency and paradoxes," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 130-138.
    9. Michel Balinski & Rida Laraki, 2022. "Majority Judgment vs. Approval Voting," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 70(3), pages 1296-1316, May.
    10. Donald Saari, 2006. "Which is better: the Condorcet or Borda winner?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 26(1), pages 107-129, January.
    11. Le Breton, Michel & Truchon, Michel, 1997. "A Borda measure for social choice functions," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 34(3), pages 249-272, October.
    12. Herrade Igersheim, 2005. "Extending Xu's results to Arrow''s Impossibility Theorem," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 4(13), pages 1-6.
    13. Conal Duddy & Ashley Piggins & William Zwicker, 2016. "Aggregation of binary evaluations: a Borda-like approach," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 46(2), pages 301-333, February.
    14. Abhijit Chandra & Sunanda Roy, 2013. "On removing Condorcet effects from pairwise election tallies," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 40(4), pages 1143-1158, April.
    15. Shmuel Nitzan, 2010. "Demystifying the ‘metric approach to social compromise with the unanimity criterion’," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 35(1), pages 25-28, June.
    16. Leo Katz, 2010. "A Theory of Loopholes," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 39(1), pages 1-31, January.
    17. Shin Sato, 2012. "On strategy-proof social choice under categorization," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 38(3), pages 455-471, March.
    18. Antoinette Baujard, 2006. "L'estimation des préférences individuelles en vue de la décision publique. Problèmes, paradoxes, enjeux," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 175(4), pages 51-63.
    19. Colignatus, Thomas, 2013. "The performance of four possible rules for selecting the Prime Minister after the Dutch Parliamentary elections of September 2012," MPRA Paper 44158, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 02 Feb 2013.
    20. Peter Emerson, 2013. "The original Borda count and partial voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 40(2), pages 353-358, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Committee election; Linear extension; Partial order; Voting theory; D71; D72;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    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:kap:pubcho:v:157:y:2013:i:1:p:145-168. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.