Preference Aggregation and Voting

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چکیده

In this lecture, we analyze the aggregation of diverse preferences. This enterprise proves a sobering experience and will make us question the efficacy of democracy. We uncover mostly troubling phenomena as a result of aggregating diverse preferences. We might first ask why we might want to aggregate preferences. The simple reason is that there are many decisions and actions whose implications we experience collectively, and therefore, we want to make those decisions and take those actions in such a way that agrees with everyone’s preferences. However, as we shall see this proves to be an overly optimistic goal. When people have diverse preferences, we may not be able to define what is a good collective outcome. There may be no consistent formulation of a collective preference. Therefore, it may not be possible to even say “here is what American’s prefer.” For if our preferences all differ, there may be no collective American preference. This is problematic. A motivation for democratic and republican forms of government is that they select policies that agree with the will of the people. A government cannot select policies that are reflective of the will of the people if the will of people does not exist. Even if the will does not exist in a formal mathematical sense. Perhaps, we can overcome this problem by applying a rule for preference aggregation. If we all agree that the rule is fair and balances the interests of all, then we might say that the choices that this rule produces represents the will of the people. This approach, as we shall see, fails as well. Any such rule that transforms diverse preference into a collective choice creates incentives for people to misrepresent themselves. And, if people misrepresent themselves, aggregation takes place over false revelations, leading us to question whether the outcomes produced are good ones.

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