Can we devise mechanisms that allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences when monetary transfers are forbidden? Would we then be able to take account of how much voters wish the approval or dismissal of any particular issue? In such cases, would some minorities be able to decide over those issues they feel very strongly about? As opposed to the classical voting system (one person - one decision - one vote), we propose a new voting system where each agent is endowed with a fixed number of votes that can be distributed freely between a predetermined number of issues that must be approved or dismissed. Its novelty relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. This voting system is optimal in a well-defined sense: in a setting with two voters, two issues and preference intensities uniformly and independently distributed across possible values, Qualitative Voting Pareto dominates Majority Rule and, moreover, achieves the only ex-ante optimal (incentive compatible) allocation. The result also holds true with three voters as long as the voters preferences towards the issue differ sufficiently.
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Paper provided by University of Oxford, Department of Economics in its series Economics Series Working Papers with number
320.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism
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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.
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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!]