Looking at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules, the authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles, that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer, have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. They provide new insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings.
| 1 | The lack of theoretical and practical support for majority cycles | 23 |
| 2 | A general concept of majority rule | 52 |
| 3 | On the model dependence versus robustness of social choice results | 109 |
| 4 | Constructing majority preferences from subset choice data | 124 |
| 5 | Majority rule in a statistical sampling and Bayesian inference framework | 155 |
| 6 | Conclusions and directions for future behavioral social choice research | 191 |
| A | Definitions of cultures of preference distributions | 199 |
| B | Definitions and notation for binary relations | 202 |
| C | Proofs of theorems and observations | 204 |
Overview
Looking at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules, the authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles, that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer, have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work ...