Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

We introduce the concept of an Arrowian social equilibrium that inverts the schemata of the famous impossibility theorem of Arrow (1950. "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare."Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328-46) and captures the possibility of aggregating non-rational individual preferences into rational social preferences while respecting the Arrowian desiderata. Specifically, we consider individuals whose preferences may not be complete and who, accordingly, may be indecisive when faced with an issue. Breaking with tradition, we consider the possibility of such individuals drawing on their beliefs about society's preferences that result from the aggregation process to resolve their indecisiveness. Formally, individual choices are modeled as a rational shortlist method (Manzini and Mariotti 2007. "Sequentially Rationalizable Choice."The American Economic Review 97 (5): 1824-39), with own preferences followed by society's as the pair of ordered rationales. This results in a mutual interaction between individual and social choices. We study this interaction using majority rule as the aggregator, with an Arrowian social equilibrium specifying how individual and social choices are co-determined, while requiring the latter to be rational. Our main result identifies minimal levels of societal indecisiveness needed to guarantee the existence of such equilibrium.

Department of Economics

World University root node

The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics

Arrowian Social Equilibrium: Indecisiveness, Influence and Rational Social Choices under Majority Rule

We revisit, within Harsanyi’s impartial observer setting, the question of foundations underlying procedural fairness concerns in welfare judgments. In our setup—that of allocating an indivisible good using a lottery—such concerns, presumably, matter. We draw from the social preferences literature and relax a typical assumption made while addressing this question, namely that individuals in society do not care about procedural fairness and such concerns arise exclusively at a societal level, which are captured by nonlinear social welfare functions (SWFs). In our model, individual attitudes toward procedural fairness are identified and factored into welfare judgments. Specifically, we provide an axiomatic basis within Harsanyi’s (J Polit Econ 63:309–321, 1955) framework to represent procedural fairness sensitive individual preferences by the representation in Karni and Safra (Econometrica 70:263–284, 2002). We then show, in terms of underlying axioms, how such individual assessments incorporating both risk and procedural fairness attitudes can be aggregated by means of utilitarian and generalized utilitarian SWFs. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

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Economic Theory

Individual sense of justice and Harsanyi’s impartial observer

We address the oft-repeated criticism that the demands which the rational choice approach makes on the knowledge and cognition of a decision-maker (DM) are way beyond the capabilities of typical human intelligence. Our key finding is that it may be possible to arrive at this ideal of rationality by means of cognitively less demanding, heuristic-based ecological reasoning that draws on information about others’ choices in the DM’s environment. Formally, we propose a choice procedure under which, in any choice problem, the DM, first, uses this information to shortlist a set of alternatives. The DM does this shortlisting by a mental process of categorization, whereby she draws similarities with certain societal members—the ingroup—and distinctions from others—the outgroup—and considers those alternatives that are similar (dissimilar) to ingroup (outgroup) members’ choices. Then, she chooses from this shortlisted set by applying her preferences, which may be incomplete owing to limitations of knowledge. We show that, if a certain homophily condition connecting the DM’s preferences with her ingroup–outgroup categorization holds, then the procedure never leads the DM to making bad choices. If, in addition, a certain shortlisting consistency condition holds vis-a-vis non-comparable alternatives under the DM’s preferences, then the procedure results in rational choices. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Theory and Decision

Rational choices: an ecological approach

We address a common criticism directed toward models of expressive voting that they are ad hoc in nature. To that end, we propose a foundation for expressive behavior that is based on a novel theory of social preferences under risk. Under our proposal, expressive considerations in behavior arise from the particular way in which risky social prospects are assessed by decision-makers who want to interpret their choices as moral. To illustrate the scope of our framework, we use it to address some key questions in the literature on expressive voting: why, for expressive considerations, might voters vote against their self-interest in large elections and why might such elections exhibit a moral bias. Specifically, we consider an electoral set-up with two alternatives and explain why, when the size of the electorate is large, voters may want to vote for the alternative they deem morally superior even if this alternative happens to be strictly less preferred, in an all-inclusive sense, than the other. (JEL D01, D03, D81, D72, A13).