Random Walks and Voting Theory

Nicolas Vieille (1)

1 GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC

Voters' preferences depend on available information. Following Case-Based Decision Theory, we assume that this information is processed additively. We prove that the collective preferences deduced from the individual ones through majority vote cannot be arbitrary, as soon as a winning quota is required. The proof is based on a new result on random walks.

Keywords: voting theory; majority vote; random walk

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance; Economy and decision science

Nicolas Vieille. Random Walks and Voting Theory. Mathematics of Operations Research, 2004, Vol.29,n°1, pp.106-113. ⟨10.1287/moor.1030.0052⟩. ⟨hal-00464928⟩