Majority Judgment – Measuring, Ranking, and Electing (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

Balinski, Michel; Laraki, Rida

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262015137 ISBN 13: 9780262015134

Publisher: MIT Press, 2011

Synopsis

An account of a new theory and method of voting, judging and ranking, majority judgment, shown to be superior to all other known methods. In Majority Judgment, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki argue that the traditional theory of social choice offers no acceptable solution to the problems of how to elect, to judge, or to rank. They find that the traditional model-transforming the "preference lists" of individuals into a "preference list" of society-is fundamentally flawed in both theory and practice. Balinski and Laraki propose a more realistic model. It leads to an entirely new theory and method-majority judgment-proven superior to all known methods. It is at once meaningful, resists strategic manipulation, elicits honesty, and is not subject to the classical paradoxes encountered in practice, notably Condorcet's and Arrow's. They offer theoretical, practical, and experimental evidence-from national elections to figure skating competitions-to support their arguments. Drawing on insights from wine, sports, music, and other competitions, Balinski and Laraki argue that the question should not be how to transform many individual rankings into a single collective ranking, but rather, after defining a common language of grades to measure merit, how to transform the many individual evaluations of each competitor into a single collective evaluation of all competitors. The crux of the matter is a new model in which the traditional paradigm-to compare-is replaced by a new paradigm-to evaluate.

About this title

About the Author

Michel Balinski was Directeur de Recherche de classe exceptionnelle (Emeritus), C.N.R.S. and the Laboratoire d'Econometrie, Departement d'economie, ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France. Rida Laraki is Charge de Recherche de premiere classe, C.N.R.S., Laboratoire d'Econometrie, Professeur, Departement d'economie, ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, and Chercheur Associe, equipe Combinatoire et Optimisation, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262015137
• ISBN 13: 9780262015134
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448