English

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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:13:54.878Z