We study the aggregation of partial orders into a complete ordering, and prove both possibility and impossibility results in this context. First, we show that the standard independence of irrelevant alternatives condition is stronger here since even dictatorial aggregation rules may fail to...

We reappraise the Arrow problem by studying the aggregation of choice functions. We do so in the general framework of judgment aggregation, in which choice functions are naturally representable by specifying, for each menu A and each alternative x in A, whether x is choosable from A, or not. Our...

The concept of the Condorcet winner has become central to most electoral models in the political economy literature. A Condorcet winner is the alternative preferred by a plurality in every pairwise competition; the notion of a k-winner generalizes that of a Condorcet winner. The k-winner is the...

Extensive measurement is the standard measurement-theoretic approach for constructing a ratio scale. It involves the comparison of objects that can be concatenated in an additively representable way. This paper studies the implications of extensively measurable welfare for social choice theory....

When a counter-proposal is made to an initiative to change the Swiss constitution, the citizenry makes three binary majority choices: the initiative versus the status quo, the initiative versus the counter-proposal, and the status quo versus the counterproposal as a tie-breaker. If there is a...

We present simple and direct arguments to characterize strongly group strategy-proof social choice functions whose range is of cardinality two. The underlying society is of arbitrary cardinality, and agents can be indifferent among alternatives.

Consider a setting in which individual strict preferences need to be aggregated into a social strict preference relation. For two alternatives and an odd number of agents, it follows from May’s Theorem that the majority aggregation rule is the only one satisfying anonymity, neutrality, and...

Politicians, CEOs and various other types of dictators make social choices that influence both their own and others' welfare. When a dictator's preferred alternative differs from recipients', it is unclear which preferences they aggregate and how they determine this set of admissible...

We derive a very general ("Janus") money demand function, which reflects backward and forward-looking habit formation. This generality offers an explanation for the breakdown of money-demand functions and policy relevance of monetary aggregates. Integrating our Janus money demand into a...

Some economists in the Austrian tradition interpret the Arrow Impossibility Theorem (AIT) as support for their laissez-faire standpoint. They presume that the AIT cannot be applied in market settings, but in the context of voting, it adds weight to their arguments against the possibility of...

Can the exchange rate be stationary in levels? We answer this question in the negative by proving an impossibility theorem, built upon the absence of arbitrage in international economies. We establish the sufficient conditions for the exchange rate to not be a stationary process in levels, and...