Positional Voting Rules Generated by Aggregation Functions and the Role of Duplication

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a typical voting situation where a group of agents show their preferences over a set of alternatives. Under our approach, such preferences are codified into individual positional values, which can be aggregated in several ways through particular functions, yielding positional voting rules and providing a social result in each case. We show that scoring rules belong to such class of positional voting rules. But if we focus our interest on OWA (ordered weighted averaging) operators as aggregation functions, other well-known voting systems naturally appear. In particular, we determine those ones verifying duplication (i.e., clone irrelevance) and present a proposal of an overall social result provided by them.