Borda's Rule and Arrow's Independence Condition

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Maskin, Eric
• 署名单位: Harvard University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/732892
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 385-420
• 关键词: MATHEMATICAL STRUCTURE; ARROVIAN AGGREGATION; welfare

摘要

We argue that Arrow's independence of irrelevant alternatives condition (IIA) is unjustifiably stringent because it rules out making a social welfare function sensitive to individuals' preference intensities. Accordingly, we propose a modified version of IIA, MIIA, that is a necessary and sufficient relaxation of IIA for taking account of intensities. Rather than obtaining an impossibility result, we show that MIIA together with several other axioms (satisfied by virtually all voting rules and social welfare functions used in practice and studied in theory) uniquely characterizes the Borda count (sometimes called rank-order voting) as a social welfare function.