When groups of individuals make choices among several alternatives, the most compelling social outcome is the Condorcet winner, namely the alternative beating all others in a pair-wise contest. Obviously the Condorcet winner cannot be overturned if one sub-group proposes another alternative it happens to favor. However, in some cases, and especially with haphazard voting, there will be no clear unique winner, with the outcome consisting of a triple of pair-wise winners that each beat different subsets of the alternatives (i.e. a Âtop-cycleÂ.) We explore the sensitivity of Condorcet winners to various perturbations in the voting process that lead to top-cycles. Surprisingly, variations in the number of votes for each alternative is much less important than consistency in a voterÂs view of how alternatives are related. As more and more voterÂs preference orderings on alternatives depart from a shared model of the domain, then unique Condorcet outcomes become increasingly unlikely.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MIT/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/30565 |
| Date | 16 August 2005 |
| Creators | Richards, Whitman |
| Source Sets | M.I.T. Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 18 p., 17793797 bytes, 614937 bytes, application/postscript, application/pdf |
| Relation | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
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