Belief-independence and (robust) strategy-proofness

Abstract An important appeal of strategy-proofness is the robustness that it implies. Under a strategy-proof voting rule, every individual has an optimal strategy independently of the behavior of all other voters, namely truth-telling. In particular, optimal play is robust with respect to the beliefs voters may have about the type and the behavior of the other voters. Following Blin and Satterthwaite (Economet J Economet Soc 45(4):881–888, 1977), we call this logically weaker property “belief-independence.” In this paper, we give a number of examples of voting rules that are belief-independent but not strategy-proof. However, we also show that belief-independence implies strategy-proofness under a few natural additional conditions. The notion of belief-independence naturally leads to a the strengthening of strategy-proofness to “robust” strategy-proofness which requires that no voter whose true preference may come from a restricted domain can benefit by submitting any unrestricted preference ordering given any unrestricted preference profile for all other voters. There are examples of strategy-proof voting rules (on a restricted domain) that are not robustly strategy-proof, but under natural additional conditions the two properties are shown to be equivalent.