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Storable Votes and Agenda Order Control. Theory and Experiments

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  • Casella, Alessandra

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.

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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 7050.

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Date of creation: Nov 2008
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Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7050

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Keywords: agenda power; cheap talk; committees; storable votes; voting;

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  1. Joseph Farrell and Robert Gibbons., 1988. "Cheap Talk Can Matter in Bargaining," Economics Working Papers 8863, University of California at Berkeley.
  2. Alessandra Casella, 2002. "Storable votes," Discussion Papers 0102-71, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
  3. Alessandra Casella & Andrew Gelman & Thomas R. Palfrey, 2003. "An experimental study of storable votes," Discussion Papers 0304-01, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
  4. Alessandra Casella & Andrew Gelman, 2005. "A simple scheme to improve the efficiency of referenda," Discussion Papers 0506-04, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
  5. Alessandra Casella & Thomas Palfrey & Raymond Riezman, 2006. "Minorities and Storable Votes," Levine's Bibliography 321307000000000199, UCLA Department of Economics.
  6. Bhaskar Dutta & Matthew O. Jackson & Michel Le Breton, 2004. "Equilibrium agenda formation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 23(1), pages 21-57, 08.
  7. Palfrey, Thomas R. & Rosenthal, Howard, 1991. "Testing for effects of cheap talk in a public goods game with private information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 183-220, May.
  8. Rafael Hortala-Vallve, 2007. "Qualitative Voting," Economics Series Working Papers 320, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
  9. Crawford, Vincent, 1998. "A Survey of Experiments on Communication via Cheap Talk," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 78(2), pages 286-298, February.
  10. Farrell, Joseph, 1995. "Talk Is Cheap," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(2), pages 186-90, May.
  11. Matthew O Jackson & Hugo F Sonnenschein, 2007. "Overcoming Incentive Constraints by Linking Decisions -super-1," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(1), pages 241-257, 01.
  12. V. Crawford & J. Sobel, 2010. "Strategic Information Transmission," Levine's Working Paper Archive 544, David K. Levine.
  13. McKelvey, Richard D., 1976. "Intransitivities in multidimensional voting models and some implications for agenda control," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 472-482, June.
  14. Gerardi, Dino & Yariv, Leeat, 2007. "Deliberative voting," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 317-338, May.
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