Majority decisions based on difference of votes

In this paper a class of voting procedures, located between simple and unan imous majorities, is introduced and characterized. Given two alternatives, the winning alternative is the one with a number of votes exceeding that ob tained by the other in a previously fixed quantity. Moreover, a subclass of these voting procedures has been considered, by demanding additionally a n umber of votes greater than a previously fixed threshold. The main results of this paper are characterizations of these voting procedures through aggr egation functions of fuzzy preferences associated with quasiarithmetic mean s and ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.