Voting Rights, Agenda Control and Information Aggregation / Laurent Bouton, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Antonin Macé, Dimitrios Xefteris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bouton, Laurent.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Llorente-Saguer, Aniol.

Macé, Antonin.

Xefteris, Dimitrios.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29005.

NBER working paper series no. w29005

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

This paper examines the comparative properties of voting rules based on the richness of their ballot spaces, assuming a given distribution of voting rights. We focus on how well voting rules aggregate the information dispersed among voters. We consider how different voting rules affect both voters' decisions at the voting stage and the incentives of the agenda-setter who decides whether to put the proposal to a vote. Without agenda-setter, the voting efficiency of rules is higher when their ballot space is richer. Moreover, full-information efficiency requires full divisibility of the votes. In the presence of an agenda-setter, we uncover a novel trade-off: in some cases, rules with high voting efficiency provide worse incentives to the agenda-setter to select good proposals. This negative effect can be large enough to wash out the higher voting efficiency of even the most efficient rules.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2021.