Marcus wrote: Maskin's argumentation doesn't work because of the following reason: Whether an election method is good or bad depends on which criteria it satisfies.
---- Now, if "good" and "bad" are defined by which criteria methods satisfy, it seems to me that having introduced "judgement" we need "judges" to define the "goodness" of each criterion. And if there are more than 2 "judges" to decide the "goodness" of more than two criteria, there is no unambiguous way to consolidate the opinions of the "judges." I think Maskin's "arguent" is actually a really old one - if there's a CW nobody really has a complaint (though there are pathological cases where the CW is disliked by a majority of the voters...) and if there's not a CW use Borda (or Bucklin or ...) considering only the smallest Smith Set. Logically, all we're talking about here is how to order alternatives in pairwise A>B>C>A loops, right? If we don't like Y=Borda we can start talking about what "Y" should be if there's a need to have a "Y". ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
