Publications---Decomposable voting rules

Sequential voting rules and multiple elections paradoxes

By Lirong Xia, Jerome Lang and Mingsheng Ying.

Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK-07), 279-288.

Abstract

Multiple election paradoxes arise when voting separately on each issue from a set of related issues results in an obviously undesirable outcome. Several authors have argued that a sufficient condition for avoiding multiple election paradoxes is the assumption that voters have separable preferences. We show that this extremely demanding restriction can be relaxed into the much more reasonable one: there exists a linear order

on the set of issues such that for each voter, every issue

is preferentially independent of

given

. This leads us to define a family of sequential voting rules, defined as the sequential composition of local voting rules. These rules relate to the setting of conditional preference networks (CPnets) recently developed in the Artificial Intelligence literature. We study in detail how these sequential rules inherit, or do not inherit, the properties of their local components. We focus on the case of multiple referenda, corresponding to multiple elections with binary issues.

Paper

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