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Jury theorems with multiple alternatives

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Abstract

I consider a game in which imperfectly informed jurors vote to select one of several possible choices when there is a natural ordering of the possibilities. Each juror votes for the largest alternative the juror would like to implement, and the alternative that is selected is the largest alternative supported by a given number of jurors. For non-unanimous voting rules, the probability of a mistaken judgment goes to zero as the number of jurors goes to infinity. I also give necessary and sufficient conditions to obtain asymptotic efficiency under unanimous voting rules, and show that unanimous rules may lead to a bias in which moderate outcomes are never chosen.

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Correspondence to Patrick Hummel.

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I thank Kenneth Shotts and an anonymous associate editor for comments and NSF for financial support.

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Hummel, P. Jury theorems with multiple alternatives. Soc Choice Welf 34, 65–103 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-009-0389-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-009-0389-1

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