Measuring polarization in preferences

Burak Can (1) , Ali Ihsan Ozkes (2, 3, 4) , Ton Storcken (5)

1 School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University
2 CECO - Laboratoire d'économétrie de l'École polytechnique
3 PREG-CRG - Pole de recherche en économie et gestion
4 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille
5 Department of Quantitative Economics [Maastricht]

In this paper, we study the measurement of polarization in collective decision making problems with ordinal preferences over alternatives. We argue that polarization can be measured as an aggregation of antagonisms over pairs of alternatives in the society. We propose a measure of this sort and show that it is the only measure satisfying some normatively appealing conditions.

Keywords: Economie quantitative

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance

Burak Can, Ali Ihsan Ozkes, Ton Storcken. Measuring polarization in preferences. Mathematical Social Sciences, 2015, 78 (C), pp.76-79. ⟨10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2015.09.006⟩. ⟨hal-01457336⟩