Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare? / Alessandra Casella, Antonin Macé.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Casella, Alessandra.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Macé, Antonin.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27743.

NBER working paper series no. w27743

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, a practice indeed believed to be common. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing? We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling - the exchange of votes for votes, considering both explicit vote exchanges and implicit vote trades engineered by bundling issues in a single bill. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We cover competitive markets, strategic market games, decentralized bargaining, and more centralized mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, where votes can be bought at a quadratic cost. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions - to trade votes with oneself only - such as storable votes or a modified form of quadratic voting. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2020.