Journal Article A Characterization of Societies with Consistent Majority Decision Get access Steven Slutsky Steven Slutsky Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 44, Issue 2, June 1977, Pages 211–225, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297062 Published: 01 June 1977

[In a well known paper, Plott has given a sufficient and a necessary condition onthe set of gradients of individual preferences at a point in a multidimensional space, for the point to be an equilibrium under simple majority voting. This paper defines a class of α-majority voting rules under which, given some α, 0 extless α extless 1, an alternative x is socially at least as good as y iff the number of individuals who prefer x to y is at least α/(1 - α) times the number who prefer y to x. Simple majority rule is α = 1/2 while setting α near 0 and 1 gives two types of unanimity rule. For all elements in this class, this paper generalizes Plott by giving necessary and sufficient conditions on the set of gradients for a point in a multidimensional space to be a voting equilibrium.]

This paper considers consumers who have multiperiod utility functions that have private and public goods as arguments. The paper analyzes the effect on private demands of various exogenous balanced budget changes in the path of public expenditure: temporary, permanent, and countercyclical. The effects of temporary and countercyclical changes depend upon whether public and private goods are complements or substitutes and whether public goods are over- or undersupplied. The largest impact comes from countercyclical changes in undersupplied complementary public goods. Permanent changes tend to have a smaller impact but are harder to specify, since the results crucially depend upon the third derivatives of utility functions.