A Social Choice Lemma on Voting over Lotteries with Applications to a Class of Dynamic Games

Abstract

We prove a lemma characterizing majority preferences over lotteries on a subset of Euclidean space. Assuming voters have quadratic von Neumann-Morgenstern utility representations, and assuming existence of a majority undominated (or "core") point, the core voter is decisive: one lottery is majority-preferred to another if and only if this is the preference of the core voter. Several applications of this result to dynamic voting games are discussed.