One Team Must Win, the Other Need Only Not Lose: An Experimental Study of an Asymmetric Participation Game

Consider a parliamentary committee with an equal number of coalition and opposition members. The opposition needs a strict majority to pass a motion, whereas for the coalition a tie is sufficient to block the motion and maintain the status quo. Passing or blocking the motion is a public good shared equally by all members of the winning group, and voting is voluntary and costly. The members of which group are more likely to vote? To answer this question, we studied an asymmetric participation game where a tie favors one prespecified group over the other. The theoretical analysis of this game yielded two qualitatively different predictions, one in which members of the coalition are slightly more likely to participate than members of the opposition, and another in which members of the opposition are much more likely to participate than members of the coalition. The experimental results clearly support the first prediction.