Econometrica: May, 1999, Volume 67, Issue 3

Separable Preferences, Strategyproofness, and Decomposability

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0262.00038
p. 605-628

Michel Le Breton, Arunava Sen

We consider strategyproof social choice functions defined over product domains. If preferences are strict orderings and separable, then strategyproof social choice functions must be decomposable provided that the domain of preferences is rich. We provide several characterization results in the case where preferences are separable only with respect to the elements of some partition of the set of components and these partitions vary across individuals. We characterize the libertarian social choice function and show that no superset of the tops separable domain admits strategyproof nondictatorial social choice functions.