Composite indicators have the advantage of summarizing complex multi-dimensional concepts in a single measurement. They also suffer from disadvantages such as subjectivity in choice of indicators, ...weighting, and aggregation methods. In this paper, we update Medcalfe’s (Social Indicators Research
139
(3), 1147–1167.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1755-5
. 2018) Economic Well-Being (EWB) index of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas with the latest (2017) available data. Using this index of EWB, we investigate two social choice violations that have been understudied in the composite indicators literature. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence of cycles and violations of independence of irrelevant alternatives. Depending on the number of cities and ranking components, incidence of these social choice violations can be large, creating ambiguity in a set of rankings. In general, having more ranking components reduces the expected and, for the most part, realized, incidence of social choice violations. Further, the results suggest that the EWB index rankings should potentially be interpreted in terms of rank tiers rather than in terms of individual rankings.
We prove a representation formula that gives a new characterization of the coalitionally strategy-proof binary social choice functions. We give this characterization in the case of social choice ...functions selecting one of two alternatives (i.e., binary social choice). The domain of the functions we consider consists of profiles of preferences over a society of arbitrary cardinality and indifference is admitted. Strategy proofness is meant to be coalitional: No group of agents has incentives to form a coalition that can manipulate the social choice for their own advantage with false reporting.
We introduce the concept of complete sets of preferences, that covers interesting cases like single peaked preferences, rich domains admitting regular social choice functions, and universal domains, ...and show that strategy-proofness is sufficient to obtain the preference reversal property when the voters’ feasible set of preferences is complete.
•The set of all single-peaked preferences is complete.•With complete sets of preferences individual strategy-proofness implies preference reversal.•In infinite societies group strategy-proofness is needed to get preference reversal.
Aggregating the preferences of individuals into a collective decision is the core subject of study of social choice theory. In 2006, Procaccia and Rosenschein considered a utilitarian social choice ...setting, where the agents have explicit numerical values for the alternatives, yet they only report their linear orderings over them. To compare different aggregation mechanisms, Procaccia and Rosenschein introduced the notion of distortion, which quantifies the inefficiency of using only ordinal information when trying to maximize the social welfare, i.e., the sum of the underlying values of the agents for the chosen outcome. Since then, this research area has flourished and bounds on the distortion have been obtained for a wide variety of fundamental scenarios. However, the vast majority of the existing literature is focused on the case where nothing is known beyond the ordinal preferences of the agents over the alternatives. In this paper, we take a more expressive approach, and consider mechanisms that are allowed to further ask a few cardinal queries in order to gain partial access to the underlying values that the agents have for the alternatives. With this extra power, we design new deterministic mechanisms that achieve significantly improved distortion bounds and, in many cases, outperform the best-known randomized ordinal mechanisms. We paint an almost complete picture of the number of queries required by deterministic mechanisms to achieve specific distortion bounds.
Raising the bar (final) Elhorst, Paul; Fratesi, Ugo; Abreu, Maria ...
Spatial economic analysis,
10/02/2023, Letnik:
18, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This editorial summarises the papers in issue 18(4) (2023). The first paper investigates attitudes towards civic engagement in relation to living closer to individuals with the same social status. ...The second paper develops a Bayesian estimator of a dynamic multivariate spatial ordered probit (DMSOP) model. The third paper examines the impact of drug-related activities on violent crime. The fourth paper web-scrapes data from individual firms to provide a better understanding of the determinants of innovation. The fifth paper tests the forecasting performance in post-crises years of spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) models reformulated in first-differences. The sixth paper applies a count-data econometric model to explain early-stage (GE) business creation. The seventh paper examines patient migration flows among cantons and hospitals using a gravity model extended with spatial lags and a hospital efficiency score as an explanatory variable. The eighth paper studies whether the decision to migrate to pursue a tertiary education negatively affects student achievement at the university level as migration distance increases.
In social choice settings with linear preferences, random dictatorship is known to be the only social decision scheme satisfying strategyproofness and ex post efficiency. When also allowing ...indifferences, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known generalization of random dictatorship that retains both properties. RSD has been particularly successful in the special domain of random assignment where indifferences are unavoidable. While executing RSD is obviously feasible, we show that computing the resulting probabilities is #P-complete, and thus intractable, both in the context of voting and assignment.
•We study the computational complexity of random serial dictatorship (RSD).•We show that computing the RSD lottery is #P-complete.•We propose an efficient algorithm that computes the support of the RSD lottery.
Recently, a trend has developed around the world for referenda to be used to determine binary social decisions. In a couple of setups, we prove impossibility results of the following form: a binary ...social goal can be achieved via a referendum if and only if it is dictatorial. Hence, our results challenge the conventional wisdom in social choice theory that social decisions are permissive in two-outcome environments (May's Theorem).
From fundamental concepts and results to recent advances in computational social choice, this open access book provides a thorough and in-depth look at multi-winner voting based on approval ...preferences. The main focus is on axiomatic analysis, algorithmic results and several applications that are relevant in artificial intelligence, computer science and elections of any kind. What is the best way to select a set of candidates for a shortlist, for an executive committee, or for product recommendations? Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of candidates based on the preferences expressed by the voters. A wide variety of decision processes in settings ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer applications (collaborative filtering, dynamic Q&A platforms, diversity in search results, etc.) share the problem of identifying a representative subset of alternatives. The study of multi-winner voting provides the principled analysis of this task. Approval-based committee voting rules (in short: ABC rules) are multi-winner voting rules particularly suitable for practical use. Their usability is founded on the straightforward form in which the voters can express preferences: voters simply have to differentiate between approved and disapproved candidates. Proposals for ABC rules are numerous, some dating back to the late 19th century while others have been introduced only very recently. This book explains and discusses these rules, highlighting their individual strengths and weaknesses. With the help of this book, the reader will be able to choose a suitable ABC voting rule in a principled fashion, participate in, and be up to date with the ongoing research on this topic.
This paper characterizes status quo rules in the binary social choice environment. We consider the full preference domain which allows for indifference. We show that status quo rules are the only ...rules that satisfy ontoness, strategy-proofness and a solidarity property. The solidarity property that we consider, positively correlates the welfare of a voter to rest of the voters in case of her improvement. It is independent from the usual solidarity axiom of welfare dominance under preference replacement used in the literature.
•The paper characterizes status quo rules in the binary social choice environment.•We consider the full preference domain which allows for indifference.•We show that status quo rules are the only rules that satisfy ontoness, strategy-proofness and a new solidarity axiom, called positive welfare association.•Positive welfare association positively correlates the welfare of a voter to rest of the voters in case of her improvement.
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