Nature and statistics of majority rankings in a dynamical model of preference aggregation
Abstract
We present numerical results on a complex dynamical model for the aggregation of many individual rankings of S alternatives by the pairwise majority rule under a deliberative scenario. Agents are assumed to interact when the Kemeny distance between their rankings is smaller than a range R. The main object of interest is the probability that the aggregate (social) ranking is transitive as a function of the interaction range. This quantity is known to decay fast as S increases in the non-interacting case. Here we find that when S>4 such a probability attains a sharp maximum when the interaction range is sufficiently large, in which case it significantly exceeds the corresponding value for a non-interacting system. Furthermore, the situation improves upon increasing S. A possible microscopic mechanism leading to this counterintuitive result is proposed and investigated.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.0709.3018,
title = {Nature and statistics of majority rankings in a dynamical model of preference aggregation},
author = {G. L. Columbu and A. De Martino and A. Giansanti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.3018},
year = {2009}
}
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11 pages