Ready for the Design of Voting Rules?

Abstract

AbstractThe design of fair voting rules has been addressed quite often in theliterature. Still,theso-calledinverseproblemisnotentirelyresolved. Wesummarizesomeachievementsinthisdirectionandformulateexplicitopenquestionsandconjectures.Keywords: votingpower,powerindices,inverseproblem,designofvotingrules,fair weightsJEL: C71,D71 1 Introduction Voting in committees with dissimilar committee members raises the questionof measuring individual power, i.e., the capability to influence a group decisionunder a given voting rule. To this end, power indices were introduced in order toquantify these abilities. Despite the fact that the question for the measurementof power dates back to the late 18th century, at the very least, there is still avery active research on power indices. Indeed we believe that this will also bethe case for the next decades, giving a personal answer to a question about thefuture of power indices raised by Manfred Holler after finishing the collection[Holler & Nurmi, 2013]. Its predecessor [Holler, 1982] contains the starting pointof a vital and still widely open question in the area of power indices. To the best ofour knowledge, [Nurmi, 1982] was one of the first papers addressing the nowadaysso-called