Note—A Note on Majority Rule under Transitivity Constraints

In a recent paper [Bowman, V. J., C. S. Colantoni. 1973. Majority rule under transitivity constraints. Management Sci.19 (9, May) 1029–1041.] Bowman and Colantoni have described an optimization model which they relate to problems of majority voting in the theory of social choice. Their optimization model was a linear integer programming problem. The purpose of this note is to indicate that an alternative view may be more useful viz. formulating the problem as a quadratic assignment type. We have discussed this in detail elsewhere [Blin, J. M., K. S. Fu, K. B. Moberg, A. B. Whinston. 1973. Optimization theory and social choice. Proceedings of the Sixth Hawaiian International Conference on Systems Science. Supplement on Urban and Regional Systems: Modelling Analysis and Decision Making. University of Hawaii.] and will limit ourselves here to some brief comments.