COPELAND METHOD .2. MANIPULATION, MONOTONICITY, AND PARADOXES

An important issue for economics and the decision sciences is to under stand why allocation and decision procedures are plagued by manipulati ve and paradoxical behavior once there are n greater than or equal to 3 alternatives. Valuable insight is obtained by exploiting the relativ e simplicity of the widely used Copeland method (CM). By using a geome tric approach, we characterize all CM manipulation, monotonicity, cons istency, and involvement properties while identifying all profiles whi ch are susceptible to these difficulties. For instance, we show for n = 3 candidates that the CM minimizes the negative aspects of the Gibba rd-Satterthwaite theorem. (C) 1997 Academic Press.