Social Choice and Voting
ECTS:
4
Course Hours:
24
Tutorials Hours:
0
Language:
English
Examination Modality:
oral+CC
Objective
This course aims to study normative and strategic analysis of social decision making. Collective decision making is ubiquitous and plays a crucial role in our society. In normative analysis, we learn desirable properties of the decision rules when individual preferences are aggregated to a collective decision. In strategic analysis, we learn how the quality of collective decisions depends on decision rules inducing a various types of incentives at the individual level. Students are expected to learn theories as well as a variety of applications in real-life examples. A leading example will be voting, which plays a foundational role not only in democratic but also economic and political decision makings.
Planning
- Social choice theory :
Arrow’s model, social choice function, social welfare function
Strategy-proofness (Gibbard-Satterthwaite)
Comparing voting rules (simple majority, Borda, Condorcet, Approval voting, Majority judgment)
- Collective decision making :
Information aggregation
Condorcet Jury Theorem
Poisson Games (and other refinement models)
Apportionment problems
- Strategic voting :
Rational voting models
Group-based models
Testing rationality
References
Moulin (1988) “Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making,” Econometric Society Monographs, Cambridge University Press
Myerson (1997) “Game Theory : Analysis of Conflict,” Harvard University Press