Aggregation of binary evaluations with abstentions

A general model of aggregation of binary evaluations over interrelated issues, introduced by Wilson and further studied by Rubinstein and Fishburn and by the authors, is extended here to allow for abstentions on some of the issues. It is shown that the same structural conditions on the set of feasible evaluations that lead to dictatorship in the model without abstentions, lead to oligarchy in the presence of abstentions. Arrow's impossibility theorem for social welfare functions, Gibbard's oligarchy theorem for quasi-transitive social decision functions, as well as some apparently new theorems on preference aggregation, are obtained as corollaries.

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