Working Paper: NBER ID: w14487
Authors: Alessandra Casella
Abstract: The paper studies a voting scheme where members of a committee voting sequentially on a known series of binary proposals are each granted a single extra bonus vote to cast as desired - a streamlined version of Storable Votes. When the order of the agenda is exogenous, a simple sufficient condition guarantees the existence of welfare gains, relative to simple majority voting. But if one of the voters controls the order of the agenda, does the scheme become less efficient? The endogeneity of the agenda gives rise to a cheap talk game, where the chair can use the order of proposals to transmit information about his priorities. The game has multiple equilibria, differing systematically in the precision of the information transmitted. The chair can indeed benefit, but the aggregate welfare effects are of ambiguous sign and very small in all parameterizations studied. The theoretical conclusions are tested through laboratory experiments. Subjects have difficulty identifying the informative strategies, and tend to cast the bonus vote on their highest intensity proposal. As a result, realized payoffs are effectively identical to what they would be if the agenda were exogenous. The bonus vote matters; the chair's control of the agenda does not.
Keywords: storable votes; agenda control; voting mechanisms; experimental economics
JEL Codes: C9; D02; D7; D8
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Chair controls agenda order (D72) | Efficiency of voting scheme (D72) |
| Chair controls agenda order (D72) | Expected utility for the chair (D81) |
| Chair controls agenda order (D72) | Aggregate welfare effects (D69) |
| Chair controls agenda order (D72) | Competition among non-chair voters (D72) |
| Agenda control leads to informative strategies (D72) | Experimental payoffs resemble theoretical predictions (C92) |
| Chair's control of agenda (D72) | Overall efficiency or welfare outcomes (D61) |