
doi: 10.1007/bf01718841
Ever since Condorcet described the famous "paradox of voting" some 200 years ago, 1 political scientists have been aware that the process of direct majority-rule decision-making wilt not in general produce a stable outcome when the choice to be made is between more than two alternatives. Since majority-rule voting is a fundamental part of our decision-making apparatus, it is natural to ask what conditions are needed in Order to guarantee the existence of a stable decision. This question has intrigued both political scientists and mathematicians for some time. Some of the most interesting stability conditions have been derived using the so-called "spatial" model, in which alternative social states are viewed as points in a convex policy space, such as E n. Black and Newing [3] present a very complete and general analysis in geometrical terms for the 3-person case, where alternatives can be represented as points in E2; they extend some of their results to the N-person case. Plott [9] has found necessary and sufficient conditions for local stability in the finite-population case, where every individual's preferences can be represented by a differentiable
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 50 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Top 10% | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Top 1% | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
