Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use; the decision is then taken according to the majority of votes cast. The possibility of shifting votes intertemporally allows agents to concentrate their votes when preferences are more intense, and although the scheme will not in general achieve full efficiency, making votes storable typically leads to ex ante welfare gains. The analysis in the paper suggests that the result will hold if one of the following conditions is satisfied: (i) the number of voters is above a minimum threshold; (ii) preferences are not too polarized; (iii) the horizon is long enough.
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Paper provided by Columbia University, Department of Economics in its series Discussion Papers with number
0102-71.
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.:
Dixit, A. & Grossmann, G.M. & Gul, F., 1998.
"A Theory of Political Compromise,"
Papers
191, Princeton, Woodrow Wilson School - Public and International Affairs.
Other versions:
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.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.