Agenda control as a cheap talk game: Theory and experiments with Storable Votes

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Casella, Alessandra
• 署名单位: Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2010.07.001
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 46-76
• 关键词: Storable Votes; cheap talk; agenda; voting; committees; experiments

摘要

The paper studies a committee voting sequentially on a known series of binary proposals. Each member is granted, in addition to a vote for each proposal, a single extra bonus vote - a streamlined version of Storable Votes. When the order of the agenda is exogenous, a sufficient condition guarantees the existence of welfare gains, relative to simple majority voting. But is efficiency compromised if a chair controls the order of the agenda? The agenda becomes cheap talk and can be used to transmit information about the chair's priorities. The game has multiple equilibria, differing in the precision of the information transmitted, but the welfare impact is minor, and the comparison to simple majority voting is unchanged. In laboratory experiments, subjects have difficulty identifying the informative strategies, but payoffs are effectively identical to theoretical predictions. The bonus vote matters: the chair's control of the agenda does not. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.