{"id":382,"date":"2021-04-07T20:39:37","date_gmt":"2021-04-07T20:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/?p=382"},"modified":"2021-10-18T13:03:42","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T13:03:42","slug":"prosociality-in-majority-decisions-a-laboratory-experiment-on-the-robustness-of-the-uncovered-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/2021\/04\/07\/prosociality-in-majority-decisions-a-laboratory-experiment-on-the-robustness-of-the-uncovered-set\/","title":{"rendered":"Prosociality in Majority Decisions: A Laboratory Experiment on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jan Sauermann <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the will of the people? What is the meaning of democratic decisions? Social choice theory \u2013 the study of the aggregation of individual preferences into a collective choice \u2013 seeks answers to such fundamental questions. In the late 18th<\/sup> century, the Marquis de Condorcet applied social choice theory to describe a central problem of democratic theory; cyclic majorities: Imagine a group of three voters (1, 2, 3) has to decide over three alternatives (A, B, C). Voter 1 favors A over B and B over C. Voter 2 prefers B to C and C to A, and Voter 3 likes C best followed by A and B. If the decision rule is majority rule, the group favors A over B, B over C, and C over A. Hence, collective preferences can be irrational (intransitive) even though voters\u2019 individual preferences are perfectly rational (transitive). The existence of such a voting cycle makes the identification of a collective will impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several important theoretical contributions in the second half of the 20th<\/sup> century by Kenneth Arrow<\/a>, Richard McKelvey<\/a>, and Norman Schofield<\/a> demonstrate that Condorcet\u2019s paradox generalizes to all fair democratic voting mechanisms and that majority rule is especially prone to result in potentially arbitrary and meaningless decisions. Finding solutions to these theoretical problems remains a core concern for social choice theory and my article<\/a> aims to contribute to this objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most common explanations<\/a> for the predictability of democratic decisions refer to institutions. However, institutions themselves can become the subject of collective decision-making as William Riker<\/a> famously noted. Therefore, an ultimate explanation for the stability of majority rule must refer to individual preferences. Here, the dominant preference-based explanation for the stability of majority rule is the uncovered set developed by Nicholas Miller in 1980<\/a>. An alternative x covers alternative y, if and only if x beats y in a pairwise vote, and x beats any alternative z that is beaten by y. Hence, uncovered alternatives can beat any other alternative either directly or indirectly via a third alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my article, I argue that the uncovered set rests on implausible behavioral assumptions. For instance, voters are assumed to follow rather complex strategies. The uncovered set presupposes that voters act strategically, considering the consequences of their actions instead of choosing myopically between alternatives at each stage of the decision. In my opinion, the uncovered set puts too high requirements on human computational abilities. In fact, it took more than two decades after the invention of the uncovered set to develop a computer algorithm<\/a> for estimating its size, shape, and location in rather simple two-dimensional policy spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the uncovered set has received wide empirical support in field studies<\/a> and laboratory experiments<\/a>. So how can this confirmative evidence be explained? In my article, I focus on the experimental evidence and argue that the success of the uncovered set could be due to the fact that it coincides with the region of the policy space containing distributionally fair alternatives. The uncovered set usually occupies a central region of the policy space between voters\u2019 ideal points. However, this is also the region which commonly offers relatively equally distributed payoffs to voters. Hence, I argue that prosociality is the true underlying reason for the predictability of majority rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I test my claim in a laboratory experiment in which five-member committees have to select points from a two-dimensional policy-space by majority rule. Voters are represented by their ideal-points in the policy-space, and payoffs decrease the greater the distance between a subject\u2019s ideal-point and the outcome chosen by the committee. In my experiment, I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location and the size of the uncovered set constant. Hence, in some treatments, the uncovered set coincides with distributionally fair alternatives, whereas in others, equally distributed alternatives are located outside the uncovered set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, the experimental results are very clear and unambiguously support the prosociality explanation for the predictability of majority rule. When the equally distributed alternatives coincide with the uncovered set, 94% of all decisions lie inside. When the UCS does not contain equally distributed alternatives, it only predicts 4% of all committee decisions correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my opinion, my results have important implications for the further development of social choice applications to democratic theory. Innovative work could profit from supplementing existing approaches with insights from behavioral research. Hence, the actual shape of individual motivations deserves as much attention as the formal properties of democratic aggregation mechanisms. In particular, interpretable democratic decisions do not arise from nothing, but presuppose the addition of \u2018something normative<\/a>\u2019 to the preferences of the individuals. My study suggests that prosocial motivations can be part of these normative elements. Individuals care about others and take the well-being of other individuals into account. Thus, the viability of democracy rests on the existence of a common social bond between the members of a society \u2013 as suggested by Rousseau<\/a> more than 250 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go to full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan Sauermann What is the will of the people? What is the meaning of democratic decisions? Social choice theory \u2013 the study of the aggregation of individual preferences into a collective choice \u2013 seeks answers to such fundamental questions. In the late 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet applied social choice theory to describe a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25307,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jeps-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25307"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connect.apsanet.org\/s42\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}