IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v15y1997i1p81-93.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Uncovering some subtleties of the uncovered set: Social choice theory and distributive politics

Author

Listed:
  • David Epstein

    (Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA)

Abstract

Although the uncovered set has occupied a prominent role in social choice theory, its exact shape has never been determined in a general setting. This paper calculates the uncovered set when actors have pork barrel, or purely distributive, preferences, and shows that in this setting nearly the entire Pareto set is uncovered. The result casts doubt on the usefulness of the uncovered set as a general solution concept and suggests that to predict the distribution of political benefits one must explicitly model the institutions that structure collective choice.

Suggested Citation

  • David Epstein, 1997. "Uncovering some subtleties of the uncovered set: Social choice theory and distributive politics," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 15(1), pages 81-93.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:81-93
    Note: Received: 29 April 1993/Accepted: 28 June 1996
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7015001/70150081.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7015001/70150081.ps.gz
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

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

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. William T. Bianco & Christopher Kam & Itai Sened & Regina A. Smyth, 2015. "The uncovered set and its applications," Chapters, in: Jac C. Heckelman & Nicholas R. Miller (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, chapter 19, pages 347-366, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    2. De Donder, Philippe & Hindriks, Jean, 2003. "The politics of progressive income taxation with incentive effects," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(11), pages 2491-2505, October.
    3. Jean-Michel Grandmont, 2004. "Fiscally Stable Income Distributions under Majority Voting and Bargaining Sets," Working Papers 2004-18, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    4. De Donder, Philippe & Hindriks, Jean, 2003. "The politics of progressive income taxation with incentive effects," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(11), pages 2491-2505, October.

    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:spr:sochwe:v:15:y:1997:i:1:p:81-93. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.