Aggregating Local Preferences to Guide Marginal Policy Adjustments
12 Pages Posted: 11 Feb 2013 Last revised: 3 May 2023
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Aggregating Local Preferences to Guide Marginal Policy Adjustments
Date Written: February 2013
Abstract
We propose a social choice rule for aggregating preferences elicited from surveys into a marginal adjustment of policy from the status quo. The mechanism is: (i) symmetric in its treatment of survey respondents; (ii) ordinal, using only the orientation of respondents' indifference surfaces; (iii) local, using only preferences in the neighborhood of current policy; and (iv) what we call "first-order strategy-proof," making the gains from misreporting preferences second order. The mechanism could be applied to guide policy based on how policy affects responses to subjective well-being surveys.
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