Behavioral Social Choice
Probabilistic Models, Statistical Inference, and Applications

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules.

Michel Regenwetter (Author), Bernard Grofman (Author), A. A. J. Marley (Author), Ilia Tsetlin (Author)

9780521829687, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 May 2006

258 pages, 8 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.52 kg

2007 Outstanding Academic Title -- Choice Magazine

Behavioral Social Choice looks at the probabilistic foundations of collective decision-making rules. The authors challenge much of the existing theoretical wisdom about social choice processes, and seek to restore faith in the possibility of democratic decision-making. In particular, they argue that worries about the supposed prevalence of majority rule cycles that would preclude groups from reaching a final decision about what alternative they prefer have been greatly overstated. In practice, majority rule can be expected to work well in most real-world settings. Furthermore, if there is a problem, they show that the problem is more likely to be one of sample estimates missing the majority winner in a close contest (e.g., Bush-Gore) than a problem about cycling. The authors also provide new mathematical tools to estimate the prevalence of cycles as a function of sample size and insights into how alternative model specifications can change our estimates of social orderings.

Part I. Probabilistic Models of Social Choice Behavior: 1. The lack of theoretical and practical support for majority cycles
2. A general concept of majority rule
Part II. Applications of Probabilistic Models to Empirical Data: 3. On the model dependence versus robustness of social choice results
4. Constructing majority preferences from subset choice data
Part III. A General Statistical Sampling and Bayesian Inference Framework: 5. Majority rule in a statistical sampling and Bayesian inference framework
6. Conclusions and directions for future behavioral social choice research.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Politics & government [JP], Regional studies [GTB]