Preferences are often best aggregated by adopting the preference of one individual, who is then called an “intra-profile dictator” since her preference is decisive under the present preference profile. This paper explores how to select intra-profile dictators. First, we demonstrate that under a continuity requirement, any intra-profile dictatorship extends to a full dictatorship when the preference space has more than one dimension. Consequently, we provide two possibility results that allow for discontinuity. The first is an aggregation rule that selects the greatest element according to a linear (and therefore discontinuous) ranking over the preference space. The second is a rule that selects an order statistic according to a linear (and therefore discontinuous) ordering over the preference space.
This paper introduces a ranking over opportunity sets based on preferences satisficing: a set satisfices a preference if and only if there exists an element in the set that is considered good enough to meet the preference, and sets are ranked by the number of satisficed preferences. I compare this framework with existing models of ranking over sets and show that, when preferences are not exogenously given, it is characterized by two axioms identical to those in Kreps (1979), who analyzed rankings over sets from the perspective of preferences maximization. This result indicates that we cannot distinguish whether the ranking over sets is generated according to preferences maximization or preferences satisficing.
This paper studies the aggregation of heterogeneous individual discount functions into a social discount function. Under the classical Pareto condition, time-additive preferences imply constant-weight aggregation, which severely restricts the form of social discounting and may conflict with time consistency. We show that weakening the Pareto requirement to comparisons between consumption streams that differ at only two periods leads to a broader class of admissible social discount functions, characterized as time-dependent weighted averages of individual discount functions. Stronger axioms further restrict this class and yield familiar methods such as the maximum discount function and exponential social discounting. The results provide an axiomatic foundation for social discounting in the presence of heterogeneous intertemporal preferences.
Tournaments are well studied objects in economic theory. Copeland (1951) provides an intuitive way to select alternatives from a tournament, the Copeland set. As a tournament solution, the Copeland set possesses many desirable properties and has been widely studied. Rubinstein (1980) axiomatizes a method to rank alternatives from a tournament which is based on their Copeland scores. This paper analyzes the Copeland set from a revealed preference perspective. A choice procedure where a decision maker has a fixed underlying tournament and selects the Copeland set from every menu is behaviorally characterized.
Whether in education, performance reviews, or elections, grades serve as tools for assessment, yet the universality of their meanings remains an open question. When voting under majority judgment, voters assign verbal grades such as “excellent, very good, good, fairly good, acceptable, insufficient, to reject” to each candidate. The meaning of these grades should be clear and consistent across all voters. Balinski and Laraki ( 2011 ) describe this as a “common language” and claim that the grade labels convey absolute meaning. This paper tests the assumption of absolute meaning by examining whether the meaning of a grade depends on the grading scale (i.e., framing effect) in a political context. We conducted an online experiment (N = 1955) in which participants voted for candidates to the French presidential elections under majority judgment with grading scales with different numbers of grades. Our findings indicate that the grade distributions obtained by candidates are significantly influenced by the grading scales available to voters. Our data therefore rejects the assertion that grades convey absolute meaning, showing instead that their interpretation depends on the number of grades available.
