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The purpose is to suggest the advantages of a probabilistic model of social choice in which some naive assumptions on the individual preference relations are imposed. According to the probabilistic approach, society chooses a certain alternative in a 2-state process:(1) social probabilities are determined on the basis of individual probabilities using the X rule, & (2) a certain alternative is chosen by a random mechanism which utilizes the above social probabilities. The proposed social decision rule is of great advantage in that it satisfies a list of properties which seem desirable in a democratic political system. In particular, this rule satisfies 4 of the conditions introduced by K. Arrow (SOCIAL CHOICE AND INDIVIDUAL VALUES, New York, NY: John Wiley, 1951); it takes into account all individual preferences, including those of the minority, & intensity of preferences. The social preference ordering generated by this rule is reflexive, complete, & transitive. In this sense social rationality exists. By making some simplified assumptions on voters preferences it is shown how democratic voting can be organized & the best social choice achieved on the basis of relatively modest information, the source of which must be, of course, the voters themselves. AA.

Collective contests are examined permitting heterogeneity of stakes within every competing group. Our first concern is whether unequal distribution of stakes in a group can enhance its win probability. Our second concern is whether a large stake in a group can be individually disadvantageous. We find that if a contest is sufficiently hard for a group, the answers to these questions are positive under plausible conditions. In such situations, monopoly of the private stake is most effective in enhancing the group's performance. Ironically, in the same cases, the welfare of many group members would be negatively related to the size of their individual stake.

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on the basis of the club-members' efforts, he selects the winner on the basis of quality. This paper focuses on the effect of incomplete search of the selector on the efficiency of democratic self-governing and decentralized RSC's that control admittance to the club and its transparency, assuming that quality of their members is fixed. The incomplete search of the selector is assumed to take the simple form of fixed random sampling of the contestants - the members of the CRSC. Our results imply that, even when active rent-seeking expenditures are disregarded, the decisions of CRSC's regarding their composition and transparency tend to reduce quality and are therefore inefficient.

Many voting rules and, in particular, the plurality rule and Condorcet-consistent voting rules satisfy the simple-majority decisiveness property. The problem implied by such decisiveness, namely, the universal disregard of the preferences of the minority, can be ameliorated by applying unbiased scoring rules such as the classical Borda rule, but such amelioration has a price; it implies erosion in the implementation of the widely accepted 'majority principle'. Furthermore, the problems of majority decisiveness and of the erosion in the majority principle are not necessarily severe when one takes into account the likelihood of their occurrence. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the severity of the two problems, comparing simple-majoritarian voting rules that allow the decisiveness of the smallest majority larger than 1/2 and the classical Borda method of counts. Our analysis culminates in the derivation of the conditions that determine, in terms of the number of alternatives k, the number of voters n and the relative (subjective) weight assigned to the severity of the two problems, which of these rules is superior in light of the dual majoritarian approach.

In pairwise voting, when a simple majority rule produces a winner, that winner is robust to the minority's preferences. The typical means of protecting the minority from the decisiveness of the majority is by increasing the required majority or by augmenting the simple majority rule with constitutional constraints. In the former case the required majority q becomes larger than one-half, and this implies that the q-majority rule becomes biased in favor of one of the alternatives, usually the status quo. In the latter case the augmented rule becomes biased in favor of the minority. The main issue examined in this paper is whether the amelioration of majority decisiveness can be attained by unbiased voting rules that allow some restricted expression of preference intensities. Our results clarify that the use of scoring rules provides a positive answer to the above question when voters resort to variable degrees of coordinated strategic voting. The results are illustrated in the special cases of the plurality and the Borda rules.

In pairwise voting, when a simple majority rule produces a winner, that winner is robust to the minority's preferences. The typical means of protecting the minority from the decisiveness of the majority is by increasing the required majority or by augmenting the simple majority rule with constitutional constraints. In the former case the required majority q becomes larger than 50%, & this implies that the q-majority rule becomes biased in favor of one of the alternatives, usually the status quo. In the latter case the augmented rule becomes biased in favor of the minority. The main issue examined in this paper is whether the amelioration of majority decisiveness can be attained by unbiased voting rules that allow some restricted expression of preference intensities. Our results clarify that the use of scoring rules provides a positive answer to the above question when voters resort to variable degrees of coordinated strategic voting. The results are illustrated in the special cases of the plurality & the Borda rules. 6 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 30 References. Adapted from the source document.