In 2000, three candidates appeared on virtually all ballots in the US Presidential election: George W. Bush, Al Gore and Ralph Nadar. Bush arguably won the election by 537 votes in Florida where Ralph Nadar received nearly 100,000 votes. It is often argued that Al Gore would have won the election had Ralph Nadar not been on the ballot in Florida. Discuss how this suggests that the social choice process the US uses to elect Presidents does not satisfy the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) assumption in Arrow's theorem.
What will be an ideal response?
The IIA assumption says that a social choice process's ranking of two alternatives should be unaffected by individual rankings of a third alternative. Put into this context, the social choice process's ranking of Bush versus Gore should be unaffected by how people feel about Nadar. How Bush is ranked versus Gore in an election should therefore have nothing to do with whether there is another choice on the ballot. But in this case, it might have.
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Which of the following is characteristic of a monopoly?
A. The absence of political power B. Close substitute products C. The ability to make an economic profit in the long run D. Operating at peak efficiency
Structural unemployment results from
A. changes in business inventories. B. changes in interest rates. C. changes in both technology and the changing demand for products. D. all of the choices/statements are true.