Minorities and Storable Votes
Abstract
The paper studies a simple voting system that can increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency or treating voters asymmetrically. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions and thus elicit voters' strength of preferences. The potential of the mechanism is particularly clear in the presence of systematic minorities: by accumulating votes on issues that it deems most important, the minority can win occasionally. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only if its strength of preference is high and the majority's strength of preference is low. The result is that the minority's preferences are represented, while aggregate efficiency either falls little or in fact rises, relative to simple majority voting. The theoretical predictions of our model are confirmed by a series of experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory.
Additional Information
© 2008 now publishers inc. MS submitted 24 October 2007; final version received 16 April 2008. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation, PLESS, CASSEL, and SSEL. We acknowledge helpful comments from participants of the Conference in Tribute to Jean-Jacques Laffont in Toulouse, the Econometric Society World Congress, and seminars at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Georgetown, NYU, the University of Venice, the European University Institute, and CORE.Attached Files
Published - minorities_and_storable_votes.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 64930
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160301-142311084
- NSF
- Caltech Social Science Experimental Laboratory
- Princeton Lab for Experimental Social Science (PLESS)
- California Social Science Experimental Laboratory (CASSEL)
- Created
-
2016-03-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Other Numbering System Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Other Numbering System Identifier
- 1261