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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
Nurmi has analysed a number of voting procedures with respect to various criteria. The purpose of this Comment is to extend Nurmi's analysis to include the so-called social utility method of candidate selection. This method assumes that each voter has a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function defined over all candidates (i.e., that, roughly speaking, each voter can assign a cardinal rating to each candidate); then the winning candidate is the one with the greatest utility total.
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9 It could be argued that this example calls into question the Condorcet criteria as much as it does the social utility method. The Condorcet criteria ignore the intensities of voter preferences. In the real world it is not unlikely that voters 1, 2 and 3 would abstain, resulting in the election of B under any serious method.
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