Introduction to the Special Issues in Honor of Salvador Barberà’s 65th birthday

Abstract

The size and quality of this two-volume special issue in honor of Salvador Barbera speaks to the wide scope of his contributions as a friend, co-author, mentor, and builder. We begin by framing some of Salvador’s important research contributions. The theory of social choice is at the very center of economic analysis. In the late 1960s, following various contributions by William Vickrey, Robin Farquharson, Edward Clarke, Ted Groves, Alan Gibbard and Mark Satterthwaite, the notion of strategy-proofness took form and, together with ideas emerging in game theory, produced an “economics of incentives”. This line of research became among the most fruitful work in all of social science of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Salvador Barbera is among the most influential scholars in this line of research, particularly on the voting models side. He stands among the world leaders. In particular, Salvador Barbera’s work on strategy-proofness has been of fundamental importance and he has made several seminal contributions. These begin with papers that follow from his Ph.D. thesis and are particularly concerned with strategyproofness when one allows some randomization in outcomes. Those papers helped uncover the role of chance or randomization in social decisions, and showed the limited extent to which that can help in mitigating individual incentives for manipulation. That work has recently sparked a series of interesting follow-up papers. Salvador’s other important works on strategy-proofness in such rich domains include insightful proofs based on pivotal voter arguments and extensions to infinite settings (in work with Bezalel Peleg).