Dictatorship mechanism

Condorcet methods Positional voting Cardinal voting Quota-remainder methods Approval-based committees Fractional social choice Semi-proportional representation By ballot type Pathological response Strategic voting Paradoxes of majority rule Positive results In social choice theory, a dictatorship mechanism is a degenerate voting rule or mechanism where the result depends on only one person's preferences, without considering any other voters.

Anonymous voting rules automatically satisfy non-dictatorship (so long as there is more than one voter).

When the dictator is indifferent between two or more best-preferred options, it is possible to choose one of them arbitrarily or randomly, but this will not be strictly Pareto efficient.

Thus, students are often assigned a pre-specified priority order (e.g. by age, grades, distance, etc.)

Similarly, by Gibbard's theorem, when there are at least three candidates, dictatorship is the only strategyproof rule.