Cyclic tournaments and cooperative majority voting: A solution (Q912750)

The article at hand is concerned with the question of identifying resonable outcomes of a cooperative bargaining process if the decision- making body can choose among several alternatives. After summarizing and relating the three standard solutions to cooperative majority voting problems the author embarks on the introduction of three intuitively attractive requirements that in his eyes any resonable solution extracting process ought to obey. Firstly, he demands ``retentiveness'' of the feasible set extracted by any solution finding process; i.e. the actual outcome of the solution finding process must be an element of the feasible set. Secondly, he proposes ``predictive strength''. That is, there must be no alternative in the feasible set that would and could be eliminated as the result of a contract between some parties or factions of the decision making body. Since any such chance would certainly be seized one could identify a smaller set of alternatives that does not infringe retentiveness, thus offering a smaller, more precise set of feasible solutions. Lastly, it is argued that any solution finding process ought to be ``inclusive'' in the sense that any retentive restriction initially imposed on the initially available set of alternatives must still encompass some alternatives that belong to the original feasible set obtained on the basis of the unrestricted set of alternatives. On the basis of these assumptions the author develops a solution principle satisfying these requirements. He proves that the so-called ``Tournament Equilibrium Set'' (TEQ) is not only necessarily a subset of any standard solution but also is the only solution that complies with all three axioms.