Group-Strategyproof Irresolute Social Choice Functions

Abstract

An important problem in voting is that agents may misrepresent their preferences in order to obtain a more preferred outcome. Unfortunately, this phenomenon has been shown to be inevitable in the case of resolute, i.e., single-valued, social choice functions. In this paper, we introduce a variant of Maskin-monotonicity that completely characterizes the class of pairwise irresolute social choice functions that are group-strategyproof according to Kelly's preference extension. The class is narrow but contains a number of appealing Condorcet extensions such as the minimal covering set and the bipartisan set, thereby answering a question raised independently by Barbera (1977) and Kelly (1977). These functions furthermore encourage participation and thus do not suffer from the no-show paradox (under Kelly's extension).