Equitable Voting Rules
Abstract
A celebrated result in social choice is May's Theorem (1952), providing the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a modification of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set of rules that still treat voters equally, but have minimal winning coalitions comprising a vanishing fraction of the population. We conclude that procedural fairness can coexist with the empowerment of a small minority of individuals. Methodologically, we introduce techniques from discrete mathematics and illustrate their usefulness for the analysis of social choice questions.
Additional Information
© 2019 ACM. We thank Wolfgang Pesendorfer for useful comments. Tamuz gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Simons Foundation, through grant 419427. Yariv gratefully acknowledges financial support from the NSF, through grant SES-1629613.Attached Files
Submitted - 1811.01227.pdf
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:49a1c678734905618ff063b545340584
|
501.0 kB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 96700
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190625-114737785
- 419427
- Simons Foundation
- SES-1629613
- NSF
- Created
-
2019-06-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field