Essential aggregation procedures on restricted domains of preferences

Abstract

The restricted domains of individuals' preferences that permit the construction of Arrow social welfare functions and nonmanipulable voting procedures in which each of n voters has some power are characterized. In this context a domain is the Cartesian product of n sets of strict preference orderings. Variants of this result are obtained under the additional requirement of neutrality and in the case when alternatives are vectors whose ith components affect only the ith voter. Kalai and Muller's analogous result (J. Econ. Theory 16 (1977), 457-469) concerning nondictatorial procedures is discussed and proved as a corollary to the main theorem. © 1983.