A characterization of black's voting rule

Abstract

In his 1958 classic, The Theory of Committees and Elections, Duncan Black proposed the following lexicographic rule: for any set of feasible alternatives, and any profile of voters' goodness relations, choose the strong Condorcet winner if it exists, and select the set of Borda winners otherwise. We provide what we think is the first axiomatic characterization of this rule. We do so through the intermediary study of the generalized social welfare functions that underlie the rule's choices, and the use of axioms that emphasize what is common and what is different in the spirit of the amply debated proposals made by these two 18th-century authors. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Nos.: D71, D72, D63.