An experimental study of storable votes

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Casella, Alessandra; Gelman, Andrew; Palfrey, Thomas R.
• 署名单位: California Institute of Technology; Columbia University; Columbia University; Columbia University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2006.04.004
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 123-154
• 关键词: Voting; experiments

摘要

The storable votes mechanism is a voting method for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the sequence of decisions. This provides incentives for voters to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. Equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature-the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences-but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. We present experimental data where realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are led to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.