Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/89502 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
LEM Working Paper Series No. 2012/11
Publisher: 
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Pisa
Abstract: 
We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of constituent elements an authority enjoys a vast power of determining the social outcome, as locally or globally stable social optima can be created or eliminated. At the same time, by bundling and unbundling elements, it is also possible to greatly increase or decrease decidability both because the likelihood of intransitive cycles varies and because the time required to reach a social optimum varies. In this paper we present a rigorous framework which allow us to study this trade-off between decidability and manipulability.
Subjects: 
social choice
agenda
object construction
hyperplane arrangement
directed graphs
algorithm
JEL: 
D03
D71
D72
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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