On admissible strategies and manipulation of social choice procedures

A collective choice mechanism can be viewed as a game in normal form; in this article it is shown, for very attractive rules and for sets with any number of alternatives, how individuals involved in a collective decision problem can construct the preferences they choose to express. An example is given with a version of plurality rule. Manipulability results are deduced from such a characterization.     

Metapreferences and the reasons for stability in social choice: Thoughts on broadening and clarifying the debate

The standard model of collective choice looks at aggregation procedures which take individual preferences as existing for a specified set of alternatives. In this paper we propose that actors also have preferences for rules of choice or characteristics of choice processes (e.g., the perceived fairness of procedures or the popularity of outcomes) rather than simply for alternatives (outcomes) themselves. We argue that the positing of the existence of meta-preferences can illuminate a number of areas of choice theory. Here we focus on one such area: the problem of “too much” stability in majority rule decision making - a stability which belies the standard theoretical results on the generic instability of majority rule processes. We also show that discussion of the prevalence of stability in collective decision making needs to be clarified because there are at least six distinct types of stability which are sometimes confounded in the literature.     

A short step between democracy and dictatorship

When preferences are defined over two alternatives and societies are variable, the group formed by the relative majority rule, the unanimity rule, the dictatorial rules, and the strongly dictatorial rules is characterized in terms of five axioms: unanimity, reducibility, substitutability, exchangeability, and parity. This result is used to provide characterizations of each of these rules by postulating separating axioms, that is, an axiom and its negation. Such axioms identify traits specifically differentiating a type of rule from the other types. For instance, majority differs from strong dictatorship in the existence of a society for which collective indifference should be a less likely outcome than the strict preference of one alternative over the other. As a second example, the difference between majority and strong dictatorship can be traced back to the requirement that the likelihood of collective indifference diminishes with the size of society.     

领导者作用与全球气候治理的发展

为什么一些国家选择在气候治理中承担领导者角色,而另一些国家没有?大国领导对于气候治理的国际集体行动意味着什么?本文认为,传统集体行动理论没有突出、甚至忽视了领导者的作用,也缺乏对领导者提供选择性激励的利益分析。而领导者通过自利型的非中性制度设计,在推动集体行动过程中发挥着重要作用。通过对霸权稳定论命题的理论再思考,本文以气候变化问题为例重新发现了领导者作用对于集体行动理论的意义,并以此框架分析了欧盟、美国、中国等主要博弈方在气候议题上发挥的作用,并展望了全球气候治理的未来方向。     

When Social Partners Unite – Explaining Continuity and Change in Austrian and Dutch Labour Market Governance

Why do Austria and the Netherlands, two highly corporatist, coordinated, consensual countries diverge with respect to the involvement of social partners in their Public Employment Service? By comparing and contrasting the competing predictions of the power‐resource, employer‐centred and social partnership approaches, we identify a key omitted variable that can explain the observed variations: the ability of the social partners to unite on reform positions. We demonstrate that when the social partners are divided, their collective power is reduced and partisan‐based policy outcomes become more pronounced. In turn, when the social partners jointly favour a particular outcome, their collective power increases and they can override governmental reform plans, even if the government holds a large legislative majority. These findings highlight the causal importance of power relations between and within the social partners for institutional continuity and change.     

Beyond Condorcet: optimal aggregation rules using voting records

In certain judgmental situations where a “correct” decision is presumed to exist, optimal decision making requires evaluation of the decision-makers’ capabilities and the selection of the appropriate aggregation rule. The major and so far unresolved difficulty is the former necessity. This article presents the optimal aggregation rule that simultaneously satisfies these two interdependent necessary requirements. In our setting, some record of the voters’ past decisions is available, but the correct decisions are not known. We observe that any arbitrary evaluation of the decision-makers’ capabilities as probabilities yields some optimal aggregation rule that, in turn, yields a maximum-likelihood estimation of decisional skills. Thus, a skill-evaluation equilibrium can be defined as an evaluation of decisional skills that yields itself as a maximum-likelihood estimation of decisional skills. We show that such equilibrium exists and offer a procedure for finding one. The obtained equilibrium is locally optimal and is shown empirically to generally be globally optimal in terms of the correctness of the resulting collective decisions. Interestingly, under minimally competent (almost symmetric) skill distributions that allow unskilled decision makers, the optimal rule considerably outperforms the common simple majority rule (SMR). Furthermore, a sufficient record of past decisions ensures that the collective probability of making a correct decision converges to 1, as opposed to accuracy of about 0.7 under SMR. Our proposed optimal voting procedure relaxes the fundamental (and sometimes unrealistic) assumptions in Condorcet’s celebrated theorem and its extensions, such as sufficiently high decision-making quality, skill homogeneity or existence of a sufficiently large group of decision makers.     

Collective Action—and Then What?

Two aspects of the social psychology of collective action are of particular interest to social movement organizers and activists: how to motivate people to engage in collective action, and how to use collective action to create social change. The second question remains almost untouched within social psychology. The present article delineates research from political science and sociology concerning variables that moderate the effectiveness of collective action and maps these variables against intergroup research. Within intergroup social psychology, there is a theoretical literature on what needs to be done to achieve change (e.g., changing identification, social norms, or perceptions of legitimacy, stability, permeability). The article considers possible testable hypotheses concerning the outcomes of collective action which can be derived from intergroup research and from the synthesis of the three disciplines. For theoreticians and practitioners alike, a program of research which addresses the social-psychological outcomes of collective action and links these to identities, norms, intentions, and support for social change in bystanders, protagonists, and opponents has a great deal of interest.     

Some measures of closeness to unanimity and their implications

This note demonstrates how certain collective decision methods ensure the selection of alternatives which are the closest to win unanimously. By using four different functions for measuring the distance between preference profiles, we obtain the equivalence between the closeness to unanimity procedure (CUP) and the Borda method, the plurality rule, the probabilistic Borda rule and the L-procedure respectively.     

A theory of unanimous jury voting with an ambiguous likelihood

Theory and Decision - We examine collective decision-making in a jury voting game under the unanimity rule when voters have ambiguous beliefs. Unlike in existing studies (Ellis in Theoretical...     

Is specialization desirable in committee decision making?

Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers. Specialization (in the context of project or public policy selection) means that the decision of each committee member is based on a narrow area, which typically results in the acquirement and use of relatively high expertise in that area. When the committee members’ expertise is already determined, specialization only means that the decision of each committee member is based solely on his/her relatively high expertise area. This form of specialization is potentially inferior relative to non-specialization under which the decision of each committee member is based on different areas, not just his/her relatively high expertise area. Given that the expertise of the committee members is already determined but unknown, our analysis focuses on non-specializing individuals whose decision is based on a decision rule that does not require information on the decision-making skills. Under these realistic assumptions, non-specialization is shown to be preferable over specialization, depending on the aggregation rule applied by the committee. The significance of our approach is not limited to the specific results that we obtain. Rather, it should be viewed as a first step toward a deeper examination of the role of individual decision makers in enhancing the performance of collective decision making.     

经济发展与竞争性的村委会选举

有关经济发展与民主化之间的关系,长期以来一直是学术界争论的一个热点问题。不过,由于大多数研究者将注意力都集中在解释国家层面的民主化问题,因而对一个国家内部在民主化改革中呈现出的差异性问题则鲜有论述。本文通过详细的数据分析表明,在实施村级选举的过程中,经济发展水平较高的地方,由于村委会有较高的集体收入,村民参与的程度较高,选举竞争也较为激烈。因此,在经济发达的地方,村委会选举的制度也得到了较好的实施。一、理论分析和假设李普塞特(Seymour Lipset)很早就对经济发展与民主化的关系这个问题作过研究,他认为经济发展能促…     

‘A drop in the bucket‘: Collective efficacy perceptions and environmental behaviour

Environmental degradation is a complex problem, many aspects of which may not be solved unless collective effort is undertaken. Collective Efficacy theory provides a useful framework to investigate how people view their ability and the effectiveness of their actions to solve environmental problems, which has been largely overlooked until now. Six focus groups were conducted to explore efficacy beliefs expressed by environmental Activists and Non‐Activists in Perth, Western Australia, relating to waste management. All participants (n=38) expressed pessimistic views about the abilities of others to perform pro‐environmental behaviours. However, Activists were positive that a collective effort would be effective (‘many drops will fill up the bucket’) while Non‐Activists felt strongly that the problem would still exist even if everyone performed waste‐minimising behaviours (‘it's just a drop in the bucket’). Behaviour change interventions might be more effective if they focus on convincing people that collective effort will be effective in solving environmental problems.     

Storytelling,fairytales and autobiography: some observations on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French soldiers’ and sailors’ memoirs

Drawing, in particular, on three memoirs written by French veterans of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, this article demonstrates how authors integrated fairytale motifs into their autobiographies. Their example raises questions about the role of storytelling among migrant male work-communities. Fairytales were more than compensatory fantasies for soldiers and sailors: they provided schemas by which they could understand novel experiences in strange surroundings and, through identification with the hero, they became inspirations to action. Storytelling permitted soldiers and sailors to present themselves to their peers from behind the mask of fiction, and to broach subjects too dangerous to be discussed openly, such as desertion. The dialectic between self-assertion in the tales (even if fashioned from the collective, ubiquitous matter of oral culture) and the communal expectations of the audience, helps historians understand the limits placed on the expression of individuality in traditional societies.     

我国刑事立法领域的若干重大现实问题探讨

刑事立法是刑事法治的基础和起点.刑事法治的发展进步离不开刑事立法的科学化、民主化与现代化.审视当前我国刑事立法领域,有以下重大现实问题值得特别关注:一是犯罪化与非犯罪化问题:二是未成年人犯罪的刑事责任问题;三是单位犯罪问题;四是刑罚体系的调整与完善问题;五是社区矫正问题;六是国际公约在刑事法领域的贯彻问题.     

The Pareto rule and strategic voting

This paper uses a particular choice rule over sets of alternatives under the Pareto rule. Starting from the sincere situation every strategic misrevelation of preference is shown to be an improvement for all voters. The existence of an equilibrium under successive misrepresentations by sincere voters is demonstrated.     

Calculable Power: A Case Study of IMF Quotas and Voting Rights Reform*

Voting procedure is an important mechanism for public choice in collective bodies such as international organizations. This paper measures and compares IMF member countries’ voting power before the 2008 reform and after the 2010 reform on the basis of datasets on IMF quotas and voting rights distribution provided by IMF. Our study verifies that IMF’s quotas and voting rights reforms do help to reduce the voting power gap among member countries. The 2008 and 2010 reforms produce a greater improvement in emerging members’ voting power under the 70 percent majority rule than the 85 percent rule; the 70 percent majority rule means the United States would lose its absolute veto. Moreover, the paper disproves the underlying assumption that regards a member’s voting power as proportional to its voting rights. Countries with different amounts of voting rights can still have the same voting power.     

Opinion leaders,independence, and Condorcet's Jury Theorem

Condorcet's Jury Theorem shows that on a dichotomous choice, individuals who all have the same competence above 0.5, can make collective decisions under majority rule with a competence that approaches 1 as either the size of the group or the individual competence goes up. The theorem assumes that the probability of each voter's being correct is independent of the probability of any other voter being correct. Contrary to several authors, the presence of mutual or common influences such as opinion leaders does not easily rule independence either in or out. Indeed, and this ought to be surprising,under certain conditions deference to opinion leaders can improve individual competence without violating independence, and so can raise group competence as well.     

北京市家庭户的变化及外来人口影响

根据第五次人口普查数据 ,北京市的集体户人口比例已高达 12 % ,并且在家庭人口中外来人口比例也从 1990年的 2 %急剧提高到近 12 % ,这些重大变化在对北京市人口老龄化和家庭户变迁的学术研究和政策制定时均已不可忽视。本文计算了不同口径的北京市人口老龄化水平 ,还揭示出近年来北京市家庭户规模的大幅下降的主要原因仍是少儿比例的不断降低。本文还从年龄别、户主率和户居类型比例两个角度揭示了家庭结构变化和家庭养老功能 ,并且特别比较和分析了本市户籍人口和外来人口之间的差异     

Condorcet's paradox and the likelihood of its occurrence: different perspectives on balanced preferences*

Many studies have considered the probability that a pairwise majority rule (PMR) winner exists for three candidate elections. The absence of a PMR winner indicates an occurrence of Condorcet's Paradox for three candidate elections. This paper summarizes work that has been done in this area with the assumptions of: Impartial Culture, Impartial Anonymous Culture, Maximal Culture, Dual Culture and Uniform Culture. Results are included for the likelihood that there is a strong winner by PMR, a weak winner by PMR, and the probability that a specific candidate is among the winners by PMR. Closed form representations are developed for some of these probabilities for Impartial Anonymous Culture and for Maximal Culture. Consistent results are obtained for all cultures. In particular, very different behaviors are observed for odd and even numbers of voters. The limiting probabilities as the number of voters increases are reached very quickly for odd numbers of voters, and quite slowly for even numbers of voters. The greatest likelihood of observing Condorcet's Paradox typically occurs for small numbers of voters. Results suggest that while examples of Condorcet's Paradox are observed, one should not expect to observe them with great frequency in three candidate elections.     

A general theorem and eight corollaries in search of correct decision

The main theorem established in this study and its corollaries summarize and generalize the existing results on optimal aggregation of experts judgments under uncertain pairwise choice situations. In particular, we explicate the link between the optimal decision procedure and the decision maker's preferences and biases and the judgmental competences of his consultants. The general theorem directly clarifies under what circumstances the optimal decision rule should be the democratic simple majority rule, the elitist expert rule, an intermediate weighted simple majority rule or a biased weighted or simple qualified majority rule.