Social choice with procedural preferences

Participants in an aggregation procedure have preferences not only over outcomes but also over procedural features (such as preferring consensus, preferring to be in the majority, preferring not having to compromise, etc.) Such procedural preferences can be expressed in a framework that, contrary to the traditional Arrovian framework, has voting patterns rather than outcomes as comparison classes. The extended framework helps us to resolve several of the puzzles of social choice theory. The (more or less anti-democratic) political conclusions that some author have been willing to draw from results in the Arrovian framework are shown to rely on formal restrictions that are present in that framework but not in the extended framework that is presented here.     

Games with capacity manipulation: incentives and Nash equilibria

Studying the interactions between preference and capacity manipulation in matching markets, we prove that acyclicity is a necessary and sufficient condition that guarantees the stability of a Nash equilibrium and the strategy-proofness of truthful capacity revelation under the hospital-optimal and intern-optimal stable rules. We then introduce generalized games of manipulation in which hospitals move first and state their capacities, and interns are subsequently assigned to hospitals using a sequential mechanism. In this setting, we first consider stable revelation mechanisms and introduce conditions guaranteeing the stability of the outcome. Next, we prove that every stable non-revelation mechanism leads to unstable allocations, unless restrictions on the preferences of the agents are introduced.     

Voter Preferences and State Regulation of Smoking

Voters' preferences for smoking restrictions in restaurants, bars, malls, indoor sporting events, and hospitals are consistent with state-level restrictions on smoking in each of these public areas. This analysis is based on constructed measures of political pressure that take into account both individual preferences and voting behavior. Although smokers are less likely to vote than nonsmokers, their lower voting rate does not substantially influence the probability that a state has a restriction. Other factors, such as tobacco's role in the state economy and state income, are rarely influential.     

Index-number tests and the common-scaling social cost-of-living index

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of each individual’s expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the circular test requires the product of index values for successive price changes to be equal to the index value for the whole change. We show that both tests are satisfied if and only if the Bergson–Samuelson indirect social-welfare function is homothetic in prices, a condition which does not require individual preferences to be homothetic. If individual preferences are homothetic, however, stronger conditions on the Bergson–Samuelson indirect must be satisfied. Given these results, we ask whether the restrictions are empirically reasonable and find, in the case that individual preferences are not homothetic, that they make little difference to estimates of the index.     

Analysis of the strain on employees in the retail sector considering work-life balance

Many companies currently strive to support their employees' work-life balance through appropriate measures in order to improve employees' loyalty towards the company and to recruit new employees. In this context, flexibility in the area of working times is a measure that can influence employees' private lives immensely. This is why the individualisation of working time arrangements has been accorded high importance in current discussions on work-life balance. In this area, best practice examples can be found showing how working-time arrangements can improve the situation of the employees. It should be noted, however, that there is not one single perfect working-time model. A working-time model must always be adapted specifically to the actual situation of the company and the employees. Therefore, a targeted analysis of the challenges facing the company and the demands on the employees is essential for the creation of an appropriate working time policy. In particular, the employees' working-time preferences must be appropriately taken into account. Owing, however, to a combination of organisational complications and legal data protection restrictions, it is for the most part impossible to meet these working-time preferences in their entirety. This paper, which is based on an employee survey, illustrates the strain on employees in the retail sector and identifies different types of working-time preferences.     

On metrically conservative societies

In this paper, social choice theory is considered from the standpoint of social change. Various metrics (in a discrete setting) are introduced to measure changes in individual and collective preferences, and a society is said to be metrically conservative if social change does not exceed total individual changes. Arrow's IIA Axiom is found to be intimately related to a very restrictive metrical condition called metrical ultraconservatism. Strong characterization theorems are proved for metrically ultraconservative societies. A natural relaxation is the condition of metrical conservatism. We show that metrically conservative societies exist, and the number of possibilities can in fact grow exponentially with the population. But when the metrical condition is placed into the more specific socio-economic context of strict preference orderings, normative restrictions appear. One is the constitutional protection against the election of a dictator; another is the nonexistence of metrically conservative stable matchings, in the sense of Gale-Shapley. Some similar questions have been raised in continuous social choice theory, but the conclusions are quite different. We also consider the effect of an increasing population on the average rate of social change.The author is grateful to Dr. T.M. Tang for first drawing his attention to Arrow's General Possibility Theorem, to Professors Robert M. Anderson, Kenneth J. Arrow, and an anonymous referee for many valuable suggestions, and to Dr. W.Y. Poon for pointing out an important reference. This work was done when the author was at the University of California at Berkeley and formed part of his Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation. The views expressed here are the author's, and not necessarily those of AT&T Bell Laboratories.     

Sophisticated voting rules: the case of two tournaments

A voting rule maps voter preferences into outcomes, and is called sophisticated if there exists a voting tree whose sophisticated outcomes coincide with the voting rule for every voter preference. As yet, no complete characterization of such rules is available. In this paper, we provide an important step toward this characterization by completely solving the problem when there are two possible sets of voter preferences.The second author was supported by the Office of Naval Research, Grant N00014-92-J-1387.     

Intermediate preferences and Rawlsian arbitration rules

Given the preferences of two agents over a finite set of alternatives, an arbitration rule selects some fair compromise. We study the idea that more consensus should not be harmful: the closer your preferences are to mine (in the sense of Grandmont's (1978) intermediate preferences), the better I like the selected alternative. We describe several Pareto optimal rules satisfying this principle. If, in addition, a condition akin to Suppes' (1966) grading principle is imposed, the rule must always choose an alternative maximizing the welfare of the worst-off agent, measured by the number of alternatives that he finds worse than the chosen one.Stimulating discussions with H. Moulin and helpful comments from J. Crémer are gratefully acknowledged. The author also wishes to thank a referee and an associate editor for challenging remarks. This research was partly supported by a CAFIR grant from the Université de Montréal.     

Intertemporal stability of uncertainty preferences

We analyze the stability of ambiguity preferences experimentally, by repeatedly eliciting ambiguity attitudes towards multiple 3-color Ellsberg urns over a period of two months. 57% of the choices show stable preferences over this time period. This is significantly higher than random choices would suggest, but significantly lower than the level of consistency when measures are taken back-to-back (75%). Over the same time frame, we do not find a significant change in the consistency of risk preferences. For subjects who are able to recall their ambiguity decision after two months correctly, the share of consistent choices does not drop significantly over time.     

Attitudes towards foreigners and Jews in Germany: identifying the determinants of xenophobia in a large opinion survey

The ultimate aim of opinion surveys is the provision of information on the distribution of preferences and perceptions at the individual level. Yet, eliciting this information from the data is typically difficult. This paper uses a structural model to explain the answers on a set of questions regarding the perception of foreigners and Jews by native Germans. In this model it is assumed that in addition to observable individual characteristics there exists an underlying unobserved attitude towards minorities which drives the distribution of answers by native respondents. This latent variable in turn is assumed to be influenced by a set of observable socio-economic characteristics of the individuals. In order to estimate this model it is necessary to impose strong identification restrictions. Estimation results show that education is the key correlate of the perception of foreigners and Jews in Germany.     

Long term stability of time preferences and the role of the macroeconomic situation

We look at the stability of survey based subjective time preferences over time using data from a Dutch panel survey with a long time horizon and find that the ranking of individual time preferences is stable. Simple observation of the aggregated measured time preferences reveals instability in aggregated preferences. In order to shed light on this instability we look at the relationship between the individual socio-economic situation and time preferences and the macroeconomic situation and time preferences. While we find no clear relationship between socio-economic situation and time preferences, we find that for the sample as a whole patience is positively correlated with economic growth, but negatively correlated with income inequality. When studying how the estimations differ across income groups we observe that there is a considerable asymmetry in how different income groups react to changes in the macroeconomic situation.     

SELF-INTEREST AND PUBLIC OPINION TOWARD SMOKING RESTRICTIONS AND CIGARETTE TAXES

A burgeoning literature suggests that self-interest has littleinfluence on policy preferences. In sharp contrast are the findingsdiscussed in this paper: we show that self-interest plays adecisive role in shaping attitudes toward smoking restrictionsand cigarette taxes. Data from two random samples of Californiaadults collected by the Field Institute in April 1987 and February1984 indicate that nonsmokers are far more enthusiastic abouttightening smoking restrictions and increasing cigarette taxesthan smokers, particularly heavy smokers. We conclude by discussingseveral explanations for the apparent discrepancy between theseresults and the pattern of null findings characteristic of theself-interest literature.     

Breaking the in‐group out‐group: shifting boundaries in transnational partner choice processes of individuals of Moroccan,Tunisian, Algerian,Turkish, Punjabi Sikh,Pakistani and Albanian descent in Belgium

The ongoing popularity in some second and third generation migrants in Western Europe of marrying a partner from the countries of origin of their (grand)parents is considered to be problematic for micro and macro level societal integration of some migrant populations. Partner choice and marriage practices in migrant communities are problematized in public, media and political discourses by discriminating them from marriage practices in the ‘native’ population on the basis of three related dichotomies: (1) agency versus structure, (2) us versus them and (3) romantic versus instrumental marriage intentions dichotomies. By means of in‐depth qualitative research methodologies on the partner choice processes of women and men of Turkish, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Punjabi Sikh, Pakistani and Albanian descent in Belgium and an intersectional theoretical approach, this article aims to deconstruct popular and simplifying dichotomous representations of partner choice processes in these migrant populations. Our study reveals how religious, gender and social class boundaries are stretched to meet personal/individual desires and preferences. Individuals do experience social restrictions when it concerns social group boundaries and the potential partners that they can look for. At the same time individuals are never fully determined by their social environment, they creatively develop strategies to by‐pass certain restrictions and to some extent are able to meet their personal needs while being sensitive to the desires of their social environment.     

The structure of fuzzy preferences: Social choice implications

It has been shown that, with an alternative factorization of fuzzy weak preferences into symmetric and antisymmetric components, one can prove a fuzzy analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem even when the transitivity requirements on individual and social preferences are very weak. It is demonstrated here that the use of this specification of strict preference, however, requires preferences to also be strongly connected. In the absence of strong connectedness, another factorization of fuzzy weak preferences is indicated, for which nondictatorial fuzzy aggregation rules satisfying the weak transitivity requirement can still be found. On the other hand, if strong connectedness is assumed, the fuzzy version of Arrow's Theorem still holds for a variety of weak preference factorizations, even if the transitivity condition is weakened to its absolute minimum. Since Arrow's Impossibility Theorem appeared nearly half a century ago, researchers have been attempting to avoid Arrow's negative result by relaxing various of his original assumptions. One approach has been to allow preferences – those of individuals and society or just those of society alone – to be “fuzzy.” In particular, Dutta [4] has shown that, to a limited extent, one can avoid the impossibility result (or, more precisely, the dictatorship result) by using fuzzy preferences, employing a particularly weak version of transitivity among the many plausible (but still distinct) definitions of transitivity that are available for fuzzy preferences. Another aspect of exact preferences for which the extension to the more general realm of fuzzy preferences is ambiguous is the factorization of a weak preference relation into a symmetric component (indifference) and an antisymmetric component (strict preference). There are several ways to do this for fuzzy weak preferences, all of them equivalent to the traditional factorization in the special case when preferences are exact, but quite different from each other when preferences are fuzzy (see, for example, [3]). A recent paper in this journal [1], by A. Banerjee, argues that the choice of definitions for indifference and strict preference, given a fuzzy weak preference, can also have “Arrovian” implications. In particular, [1] claims that Dutta's version of strict preference presents certain intuitive difficulties and recommends a different version, with its own axiomatic derivation, for which the dictatorship results reappear even with Dutta's weak version of transitivity. However, the conditions used to derive [1]'s version of strict preference imply a restriction on how fuzzy the original weak preference can be, namely, that the fuzzy weak preference relation must be strongly connected. Without this restriction, I will show that the rest of [1]'s conditions imply yet a third version of strict preference, for which Dutta's possibility result under weak transitivity still holds. On the other hand, if one accepts the strong connectedness required in order for it to be valid, I show that [1]'s dictatorship theorem can in fact be strengthened to cover any version of transitivity for fuzzy preferences, no matter how weak, and further, that this dictatorship result holds for any “regular” formulation of strict preference, including the one originally used by Dutta. Received: 13 May 1996 / Accepted: 13 January 1997     

The utilitarian criterion,finite sensibility,and the weak majority preference principle

This study is a further analysis of the approach taken by Yew-Kwang Ng to derive the utilitarian criterion. Specific for the model is that individual preferences are finitely sensible. In this framweork an analysis of the consequences on social preferences when different kinds of value premises are imposed is made. It is found that the utilitarian criterion is the unique consequence only for very special choices of the value premise. In addition, uniqueness requires the underlying preferences be cardinal. It is also found that finite sensibility induces approximate cardinalization of preferences.I am grateful to Y.-K. Ng, two anonymous referees and an editor of this journal for helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. The research was financially supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences     

What Nonprofit Executives Want and What They Get from Board Members

In theory, nonprofit boards of directors exist to perform mission‐setting and oversight functions that help to ensure organizational accountability. Yet there is evidence that board behavior often falls short of this ideal. Using survey data from a sample of 241 executive directors of nonprofit agencies, we investigated whether nonprofit boards are meeting executive directors’ expectations, and if not, what factors explain this? We find that although board behavior tends to align closely with executive directors’ preferences for involvement in administration and management tasks, there is a greater disconnect between board behavior and executive directors’ preferences for involvement in mission‐setting and oversight duties. Factors that mitigate this gap include organizational professionalization and stability, whereas more extensive reliance on government funding exacerbates it. Female executive directors experience a greater disconnect in their preferences for board involvement and actual board involvement than male executive directors. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for both theory and practice.     

A characterization of strategy-proof social choice functions for economies with pure public goods

We characterize strategy-proof social choice functions when individuals have strictly quasi-concave, continuous and satiated utility functions on convex subsets of IR ^m , representing preferences for the provision of m pure public goods. When specialized to the case m=1, these assumptions amount to requiring that preferences are single peaked, and for such a domain there exists a wide class of strategy-proof social choice functions. These were studied by Moulin (1980) under strong additional assumptions. Our first results characterize the complete class, after an appropriate extension of the single-peakedness condition. The new characterization retains the flavour of Moulin's elegant representation theorem. For the general m-dimensional case, previous results have shown that there is no efficient, strategy-proof, nondictatorial social choice function, even within the domain restrictions under consideration (Border and Jordan 1983; Zhou 1991). In fact, Zhou's powerful result indicates that nondictatorial strategy-proof s.c.f.'s will have a range of dimension one. This allows us to conclude with a complete characterization of all strategy-proof s.c.f.'s on IR ^m , because restrictions of preferences from our admissible class to one dimensional subsets satisfy the slightly generalized notion of single-peakedness that is used in our characterization for the case m=1. We feel that a complete knowledge of the class of strategy-proof mechanisms, in this as well as in other contexts, is an important step in the analysis of the trade-offs between strategy-proofness and other performance criteria, like efficiency.This paper was written while both authors were visiting GREMAQ, Université des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse. We are thankful for its hospitality and good research atmosphere. Barberà's work is supported by the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales and by research grant PB89-0294 from the Secretaría de Estado de Universidades e Investigación, Spain. Jackson acknowledges the support of NSF grant SES8921409. We thank Jacques Crémer, Beth Allen, John Weymark and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Extended preferences and freedom of choice

The common choice theory in economics is based on the assumption that an individual is defined in terms of a binary preference relation. This preference relation is defined over alternatives without taking into account menu dependence and, in particular, freedom of choice or, more generally, the set that contains the alternatives. In this study we clarify the nature and the significance of freedom of choice which may positively or negatively affect the individual's welfare. Our proposed extended preference relation of the individual takes into account both the particular alternative and the opportunity set that he faces. This extended relation does not induce ranking of opportunity sets. Its restriction to a particular opportunity set is the paradigmatic preference relation and it can capture the dependence of preferences on freedom of choice. Our main result establishes the inconsistency between dependence of extended preferences on freedom of choice and the existence of a utility that represents the paradigmatic preference relation and any of its restrictions. Received: 30 December 1997/Accepted: 6 September 1999     

Searching for preference stability in a state dependent world

We evaluate stability of preference using a randomized intervention that exogenously changes the income opportunity set of participants. We use a unique panel data, comprising of surveys and lab-in-the-field experiments conducted before and after the intervention, to examine whether our elicited measures of preferences (risk, competitiveness, and confidence) remain stable. We find that after accounting for the change in the income opportunity set, the elicited preferences indeed appear to be temporally stable under a state dependent framework. Consequently, even though we find across subject variation in preferences, the average measure of preferences remain temporally stable, providing support to a representative agent model of decision-making with temporally stable preferences.