TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cantillon,Estelle
TI  - A Graphical Analysis of Some Basic Results in Social Choice
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Technical Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 268
PY  - 2001
Y2  - March 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/t0268
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/t0268.pdf
AB  - We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity.  This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on the robustness of Majority Rule due to Maskin (1995).  In each case, geometry provides new insights on the working and interplay of the axioms, and suggests new results including a new characterization of the entire class of Majority Rule SWFs, a strengthening of May's Theorem, and a new version of Maskin's Theorem.
ER  -