Only a Dictatorship is Efficient or Neutral

29 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2007

See all articles by Jean-Pierre Benoit

Jean-Pierre Benoit

London Business School - Department of Economics

Lewis A. Kornhauser

New York University School of Law

Date Written: March 29, 2007

Abstract

Social choice theory understands a voting rule as a mapping from preferences over possible outcomes to a specific choice or choices. However, actual election procedures often do not have this structure. Rather, in a typical election, although the outcome is an assembly comprising several people occupying different seats, voters cast their ballots for individual candidates, and these candidates have their votes tallied on a seat-by-seat basis. We prove two theorems: the only efficient seat-by-seat procedure is a dictatorship and the only neutral seat-by-seat procedure is a dictatorship.

Keywords: social choice, voting rules, separable preferences, candidate-based procedures

JEL Classification: D71, D72, K49

Suggested Citation

Benoit, Jean-Pierre and Kornhauser, Lewis A., Only a Dictatorship is Efficient or Neutral (March 29, 2007). NYU Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 07-01, NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No. 07-06, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=954698 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.954698

Jean-Pierre Benoit

London Business School - Department of Economics ( email )

Sussex Place
Regent's Park
London NW1 4SA
United Kingdom

Lewis A. Kornhauser (Contact Author)

New York University School of Law ( email )

40 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012-1099
United States
(212) 998-6175 (Phone)
(212) 995-4341 (Fax)

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
243
Abstract Views
1,688
Rank
227,781
PlumX Metrics