  There is an extensive literature in social choice theory studying the
consequences of weakening the assumptions of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
Much of this literature suggests that there is no escape from Arrow-style
impossibility theorems, while remaining in an ordinal preference setting,
unless one drastically violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives
(IIA). In this paper, we present a more positive outlook. We propose a model of
comparing candidates in elections, which we call the Advantage-Standard (AS)
model. The requirement that a collective choice rule (CCR) be representable by
the AS model captures a key insight of IIA but is weaker than IIA; yet it is
stronger than what is known in the literature as weak IIA (two profiles alike
on $x,y$ cannot have opposite strict social preferences on $x$ and $y$). In
addition to motivating violations of IIA, the AS model makes intelligible
violations of another Arrovian assumption: the negative transitivity of the
strict social preference relation $P$. While previous literature shows that
only weakening IIA to weak IIA or only weakening negative transitivity of $P$
to acyclicity still leads to impossibility theorems, we show that jointly
weakening IIA to AS representability and weakening negative transitivity of $P$
leads to no such impossibility theorems. Indeed, we show that several appealing
CCRs are AS representable, including even transitive CCRs.
