A note on social choice theory without the Pareto principle

This paper was originally submitted to Journal of Economic Theory and was accepted. After presenting it at the first meeting of the society for social choice and welfare in Caen, France, we were informed by Professor Bernard Monjardet that a weak version of our main result (Proposition 1) had been proved in Y. Murakami's book, Logic and Social Choice, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1968. We later voluntarily withdrew the paper from JET even though the editor was still willing to publish it on the ground that it would do the profession a service by making more people aware of a simple yet fundamental result in social choice theory. Instead we decide to submit this paper to Social Choice and Welfare, hoping that it will reach the intended readers more effectively.     

A note on the non-emptiness of the stability set

Peleg (1978) presents a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the core, by considering quota games. The purpose of this paper is to present a similar result for the non-emptiness of another solution concept introduced by Rubinstein (1980) and called the stability set. Received: 25 January 1999/Accepted: 6 July 1999     

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

 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. Received: 29 April 1993/Accepted: 28 June 1996     

A note on interdependent happiness

Based on two models of interdependent utilities [Becker, G., 1974. A theory of social interaction, Journal of Political Economy 82, 1064–1093; Fehr, E., Schmidt, K., 1999. A theory of fairness, competition, and cooperation, Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, 817–868] we derive a functional relationship between average happiness and the standard deviation of happiness within a country. This hypothesis is supported by an empirical investigation of 71 countries which shows that the average happiness in these countries depends only on income and on the standard deviation of happiness σ. The latter may be partly based on influences beyond income, for which no data are available. Income has the expected positive influence and σ has the expected negative influence, i.e. large differences in “autonomous” happiness have a dampening influence on “effective” happiness which also takes into account the happiness of others.     

A note on female ejaculation

We developed a 14‐item Attitudes Toward Sexuality Scale (ATSS) to compare the sexual attitudes of early, middle, and late adolescents and their parents. One hundred forty‐one adolescents between the ages of 12 and 20 and their parents completed a questionnaire consisting of the ATSS and demographic information. The Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient for the adolescents was .75, and for the parents it was .84. A principal components analysis revealed four major dimensions of the scale: a large General factor, Legality/Morality, Alternative Modes of Sexual Expression, and Individual Rights. The correlation pattern between the ATSS and subscales of the Sex Knowledge and Attitudes Test, as well as with certain demographic variables, supports the construct validity of the ATSS. This is, therefore, a scale which may be used for research in which the sexual attitudes of adults and adolescents of various ages are to be measured and compared.     

A note on the measurement of inequality and interpersonal comparability

Inequality and welfare measures are constructed to satisfy homotheticity and additive separability but not symmetry. They lead to the simplest form of interpersonal comparability.     

A note on the paradox of smaller coalitions

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TU-game and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy’s (Int J Game Theory 8:133–164, 1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in order to compare it to the top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (Social Choice Welfare 18:135–153, 2001) that guarantees nonemptiness of the core in more general models. As it turns out, the top coalition property implies a condition in which Shenoy’s paradox is not present for at least one minimal winning coalition. Conversely, if for each non-null player Shenoy’s paradox is not present for at least one minimal winning coalition containing that player, then the induced hedonic game satisfies the top coalition property.     

A smallest tournament for which the Banks set and the Copeland set are disjoint

Given a tournament T, a Banks winner of T is the first vertex of any maximal (with respect to inclusion) transitive subtournament of T; a Copeland winner of T is a vertex with a maximum out-degree. In this paper, we show that 13 is the minimum number of vertices that a tournament must have so that none of its Copeland winners is a Banks winner: for any tournament with less than 13 vertices, there is always at least one vertex which is a Copeland winner and a Banks winner simultaneously. Received: 2 May 1997 / Accepted: 30 September 1997     

A note from the editor

A note from the editor