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Effectiveness of Weighted Majority Rules with Random Decision Power Distribution
Author(s) -
BEREND DANIEL,
CHERNYAVSKY YURI
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9779.2008.00370.x
Subject(s) - majority rule , decision rule , simple (philosophy) , group (periodic table) , group decision making , distribution (mathematics) , mathematical economics , mathematics , statistics , econometrics , combinatorics , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , social psychology , mathematical analysis , philosophy , chemistry , organic chemistry , epistemology
There is a large body of research studying the conditions under which majority decisions are best. In particular, in many circumstances, the probability of a group to decide correctly is higher than that of a random subgroup. Moreover, the latter probability increases as the subgroup size grows. Here we generalize those results by showing that, in the same setup, the simple majority rule is the most effective of all weighted majority rules when weights are distributed randomly between group members. For special families of weighted majority rules, rule effectiveness increases as we get “closer” to the simple majority rule.