An impossibility theorem concerning positive involvement in voting
Theoretical Economics
2025-04-01 v5 Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
Abstract
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning to losing. In this note, we prove a new impossibility theorem concerning this axiom: there is no ordinal voting method satisfying positive involvement that also satisfies the Condorcet winner and loser criteria, resolvability, and a common invariance property for Condorcet methods, namely that the choice of winners depends only on the ordering of majority margins by size.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.05657,
title = {An impossibility theorem concerning positive involvement in voting},
author = {Wesley H. Holliday},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05657},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Fixed typos in bibliography