Burak Can

Measuring polarization in preferences

In this paper, we study the measurement of polarization in collective decision making problems with ordinal preferences over alternatives. We argue that polarization can be measured as an aggregation of antagonisms over pairs of alternatives in the society. We propose a measure of this sort and show that it is the only measure satisfying some normatively appealing conditions.

Measuring rank mobility with variable population size

We provide a characterization of a class of rank-mobility measures. These measures generalize the Kemeny measure that is well-known from the literature on measuring the distance between orderings. We use replication invariance to ensure that our measures are applicable in variable-population settings. The rank-based approach to mobility has a natural connection with the study of social status. Rank-based measures are widely applied in empirical research but their theoretical foundation is still in need of further investigation, and we consider our approach to be a contribution towards this objective. Journal of Economic Literature Classification No.: D63.

A Head‐count Measure of Rank Mobility and its Directional Decomposition

We propose and characterize a new measure of rank mobility. The index is given by the head count of those whose positions change in the move from one period to the next divided by population size. The interpretation of this head-count ratio is straightforward and intuitive. In addition, we illustrate how the measure can be decomposed into an index of upwards mobility and an index of downwards mobility. The axioms used in our characterization results are appealing and easy to justify.

Stereotype formation as trait aggregation

We propose an aggregation model which explains stereotype formation under the attribution hypothesis. We show, under very mild axioms, that an observer can be thought of perceiving a group in terms of her subjective opinion about the representativeness of subgroups, as well as a possible prejudice she might have.