Date Thesis Awarded

5-2008

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only

Degree Name

Bachelors of Science (BS)

Department

Economics

Advisor

Donald E. Campbell

Committee Members

C. Lawrence Evans

Carlisle E. Moody, Jr.

Abstract

A social choice rule g selects a member of a given set of alternative X as a function of individual preferences. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem establishes that if preferences are unrestricted and the range of g has at least three members, only dictatorial rules are strategy-proof. However, if the domain of g is the set of profiles at which there exists a strong Condorcet winner, Campbell and Kelly have shown that majority-rule is the only non-dictatorial strategy-proof rule for an odd number of individuals when the range of g contains at least three alternatives. Dasgupta and Maskin consider the case of a continuum of voters as a means of circumventing the issue of parity. Although their analysis provides an approximation for a sufficiently large (but finite) set of individuals, no exact analysis exists for an arbitrary even number of individuals. We are therefore interested in characterizing the family of strategy-proof social choice rules over the Condorcet domain for an even number of individuals. We provide a full characterization when individual preferences are strict linear orderings, and prove several propositions concerning strategy-proof rules when individual preference orderings are permitted to be weak linear orders.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Comments

Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.

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