2025/08/11 by Yaron Azrieli, Azrieli, Yaron, Ritesh Jain +3
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Economics and business #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH) #User Authentication and Security Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.08055
openalex publication_date 2025/08/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference intensities outperform any ordinal mechanism.