Efficiency, Equity, and Timing in Voting Mechanisms
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing in Voting Mechanisms by Marco Battaglini, Princeton University Rebecca Morton, New York University Thomas Palfrey, Princeton University CEPS Working Paper No. 121 September 2005 We thank Anna Bassi, Shivani Nayyar, Valeria Palanza, and Stephanie Wang for their research assistance. We also benefited from the comments of Sandy Gordon, Scott DeMarchi, and participants at the Interactions Workshop at GREQAM, Marseille, the Conference on Constitutional and Scientific Quandries at ICER, Torino, the Conference in Tribute to Jean- Jacques Laffont in Toulouse, the 2005 American Political Science Association Annual Meetings, and seminar participants at the Princeton Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. Thomas Palfrey acknowledges support from NSF grants SES-0079301 and SES-0094800, as well as from Princeton University’s Center for Economic Policy Studies. Abstract We compare the behavior of voters, depending on whether they operate under sequential and simultaneous voting rules, when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many real political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a styl- ized model, we characterize the equilibria for this rule, and compare it to simultaneous voting, and show how these equilibria vary for di¤erent voting costs. This generates a variety of predictions about the relative e¢ ciency and equity of these two systems, which we test using controlled laboratory experiments. Most of the qualitative predictions are supported by the data, but there are signi…cant departures from the predicted equilib- rium strategies, in both the sequential and sumultanous voting games.
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