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 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
14487.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 2008 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14487
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Casella, Alessandra & Gelman, Andrew & Palfrey, Thomas R., 2003.
"An Experimental Study of Storable Votes,"
Working Papers
1173, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]
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!]
Jackson, Matthew O. & Dutta, Bhaskar & Le Breton, Michele, 2002.
"Equilibrium Agenda Formation,"
Working Papers
1152, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]
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