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Ordinally Bayesian Incentive Compatible Voting Rules

Dipjyoti Majumdar
Arunava Sen

Abstract

We study strategic voting after weakening the notion of strategy-proofness to Ordinal Bayesian Incentive Compatibility (OBIC). Under OBIC, truth-telling is required to maximize the expected utility of every voter, expected utility being computed with respect to the voter's prior beliefs and under the assumption that everybody else is also telling the truth. We show that for a special type of priors, i.e., the uniform priors, there exists a large class of social choice functions that are OBIC. However, for priors that are generic in the set of independent beliefs, a social choice function is OBIC only if it is dictatorial. This result underlines the robustness of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem.