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.
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Paper provided by California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences in its series Working Papers with number
1173.
Length: 69 pages Date of creation: Sep 2003 Date of revision: Publication status: Published: Handle: RePEc:clt:sswopa:1173
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Alessandra Casella, 2002.
"Storable votes,"
Discussion Papers
0102-71, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Alessandra Casella, 2002.
"Storable Votes,"
NBER Working Papers
9189, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Martin J. Osborne & Jeffrey S. Rosenthal & Matthew A. Turner, 2000.
"Meetings with Costly Participation,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 927-943, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Martin Osborne & Jeffry Rosenthal & Matthew A. Turner, 1998.
"Meetings with costly participation,"
Working Papers
mturner-98-02, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Alessandra Casella & Thomas Palfrey & Raymond Riezman, 2005.
"Minorities and Storable Votes,"
NBER Working Papers
11674, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Casella, Alessandra & Palfrey, Thomas R. & Riezman, Raymond, 2006.
"Minorities and storable votes,"
Working Papers
1261, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]