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Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result

Allan Gibbard

Abstract

It has been conjectured that no system of voting can preclude strategic voting--the securing by a voter of an outcome he prefers through misrepresentation of his preferences. In this paper, for all significant systems of voting in which chance plays no role, the conjecture is verified. To prove the conjecture, a more general theorem in game theory is proved: a game form is a game without utilities attached to outcomes; only a trivial game form, it is shown, can guarantee that whatever the utilities of the players may be, each player will have a dominant pure strategy.