Candidate Stability and Nonbinary Social Choice

Abstract

A desirable property of a voting procedure is that it be immune to the strategic withdrawal of a cadidate for election. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (Econometrica,2001) have established a number of theorems which demonstrate that this condition is incompatible with some other desirable properties of voting procedures. This article shows that Grether and Plott's nonbinary generalization of Arrow's Theorem can be used to provide simple proofs of these impossibility theorems.