CeDEx
Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics

CeDEx Seminar - Sandro Ambuehl (University of Zurich)

Location
A40 Sir Clive Granger Building
Date(s)
Wednesday 4th March 2020 (14:00-15:00)
Description
Our speaker this week is Sandro Ambuehl from the University of Zurich. 

The Will of the People: How do Individuals Aggregate Ordinal Preferences? (with B.D. Bernheim)

Celebrated impossibility results (Arrow, 1950, Sen, 1970) show that there is no single best rule for aggregating ordinal preferences. Yet, groups of individuals, from small committees to populous nations, cannot simply eschew social choice, raising the question of how individuals believe normatively appealing aggregation should occur. In our experiment, individuals in the role of Social Architects make a choice for a group they are not part of, knowing only group members’ ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We characterize the social choice rules Social Architects implement, and show that these rules represent Social Architects’ normative standards. We find that the vast majority of Social Architects choose as if by imputing cardinal values for each of the preference ranks, and using those to maximize a utilitarian social welfare function. By contrast, the Condorcet-rule, a frequently used benchmark to measure the normative appeal of preference aggregation procedures, finds little empirical support. Our results also fill an important gap in the literature on other-regarding preferences that exclusively considers cardinally comparable outcomes.

Wednesday 4 March at 2pm in A40 Sir Clive Granger.

Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics

Sir Clive Granger Building
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0)115 951 5458
Enquiries: jose.guinotsaporta@nottingham.ac.uk
Experiments: cedex@nottingham.ac.uk