Working Paper: NBER ID: w9982
Authors: Alessandra Casella; Andrew Gelman; Thomas R. Palfrey
Abstract: The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature---the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences---but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance.
Keywords: storable votes; voting mechanisms; efficiency; experimental study
JEL Codes: H1; C9; C7
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| concerns about game's complexity (C73) | practical relevance (C20) |
| storable votes mechanism (D72) | welfare gains (D69) |
| storable votes mechanism (D72) | efficiency of voting outcomes (D72) |
| voters' allocation of votes (D72) | outcomes of decisions (D70) |
| storable votes mechanism (D72) | efficiency improvements (D61) |
| voters' strategies (D72) | efficiency improvements (D61) |
| subjects' strategies (C90) | theoretical equilibrium (D50) |
| storable votes mechanism (D72) | robustness despite deviations (L15) |