Majority cycles in a multi-dimensional setting

Summary. We consider a set of alternatives (electoral platforms, bills, etc. ...) defined as a Cartesian product of k finite discrete sets. We assume that the preferences of the individuals (voters) are marginally single-peaked and separable. The main result of this paper states that the pairwise majority relation satisfies these two properties but that it might exhibit several cycles. This result is important when related to classical problems of multi-dimensional decisions such as logrolling and vote trading. We relate our result with a continuous version of it (McKelvey, 1976). Received: March 21, 2000; revised version: April 12, 2001