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The voting paradox … with a single voter? Implications for transitivity in choice under risk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2019

David Butler  and
Pavlo Blavatskyy
David Butler*
Affiliation:
Griffith Business School, Building G42, Parklands Drive, Southport, QLD 9726, Australia
Pavlo Blavatskyy
Affiliation:
Montpellier Business School, Montpellier Research in Management, 2300, Avenue des Moulins, 34185 Montpellier Cedex 4, France
*
*Corresponding author. Email: david.butler@griffith.edu.au
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Abstract

The voting paradox occurs when a democratic society seeking to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference reaches an intransitive ordering. However it is not widely known that the paradox may also manifest for an individual aggregating over attributes of risky objects to form a preference over those objects. When this occurs, the relation ‘stochastically greater than’ is not always transitive and so transitivity need not hold between those objects. We discuss the impact of other decision paradoxes to address a series of philosophical and economic arguments against intransitive (cyclical) choice, before concluding that intransitive choices can be justified.

Keywords

Condorcet paradoxintransitivitycyclesexpansion consistencymoney pumpC44D71D81D91
Type
Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 61 - 79
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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