Get Rid of Unanimity: The Superiority of Majority Rule with Veto Power / Laurent Bouton, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Frédéric Malherbe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bouton, Laurent.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Llorente-Saguer, Aniol.

Malherbe, Frédéric.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20417.

NBER working paper series no. w20417

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Get Rid of Unanimity

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule with veto power (Veto) - that essentially resolves this tension, for it combines the advantageous properties of both majority and unanimity rules. We argue that our results shed new light on the evolution of voting rules in the EU institutions and could help to inform debates about policy reforms in cases such as juries in the US.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2014.