CONNECTING AND RESOLVING SENS AND ARROWS THEOREMS

It is shown that the source of Sen's and Arrow's impossibility theorem s is that Sen's Liberal condition and Arrow's IIA counter the critical assumption that voters have transitive preferences. But if the proced ures are not permitted to treat the transitivity of individual prefere nces as a valued input, then we cannot expect rational outputs. Once t his common cause for these perplexing conclusions is understood, these classical conclusions end up admitting quite benign interpretations w here it becomes possible to propose several resolutions.