Is Democracy Meaningless? Arrow’s Condition of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives
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چکیده
Introduction. The interpretation that Arrow’s Condition I, independence of irrelevant alternatives, prohibits the use of individuals’ intensities of preference in the construction of social choices, is not precise. Rather, it is the social welfare function (as defined in Chapter 4), which demands both individual and social orderings, and thereby prohibits cardinal utility inputs. Condition I, as Arrow wrote it, redundantly requires individual orderings, but goes further and demands that, even given the ordinal data from individual orderings, the social choice over any two alternatives not be influenced by individuals’ preferences involving any third alternatives. 2 This is explicit in Arrow (1963/1951, 59, emphasis added):
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