Topics
1.
Information aggregation by voting
Consider a group of like-minded voters who wish to make a correct decision, but who might disagree on which the correct decision is due to private information. These common value voters wish their pieces of (possibly conflicting) information to be efficiently aggregated. But can they achieve their goal by means of simple voting procedures? How do alternative electoral systems perform with respect to information aggregation? Can we use novel mechanisms with richer action spaces, inspired by recent technological advances spaces (e.g. continuous voting liquid democracy etc.), to improve democratic outcomes?
2.
Costly political influence
Many political issues generate fierce political competition between opposing interest groups. Supporters on each side take costly actions to promote their preferred alternative, and the likelihood that each alternative is collectively chosen increases in the total backing it receives. How does the collective choice depend on the profile of preferences, the cost of supportive actions, and the inequality in resources? Under what conditions will collective decisions align with majoritarian principles or with the utilitarian welfare optimum? Can we describe the class of social choice rules that this tug-of-war political process ends up implementing?
Moreover, allowing voters to trade votes for money may generate either negative or positive externalities: A voter is harmed (benefited) if voters she agrees with end up with reduced (increased) voting power. However, the plausibility of each kind of externality crucially depends on the electoral rule in place (i.e. on the way votes are aggregated into a political outcome). Focusing on a private-values setting with two alternatives we present existing formal and experimental results.
Reading material
Ahn, David S., and Santiago Oliveros. "Approval voting and scoring rules with common values." Journal of Economic Theory 166 (2016): 304-310.
Austen-Smith, David, and Jeffrey S. Banks. "Information aggregation, rationality, and the Condorcet jury theorem." American political science review 90, no. 1 (1996): 34-45.
Barelli, Paulo, Sourav Bhattacharya, and Lucas Siga. "Full Information Equivalence in large elections." (2021): mimeo.
Borgers, Tilman. "Costly voting." American Economic Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 57-66.
Bouton, Laurent, and Micael Castanheira. "One person, many votes: Divided majority and information aggregation." Econometrica 80, no. 1 (2012): 43-87.
Bouton, Laurent, Micael Castanheira, and Aniol Llorente-Saguer. "Divided majority and information aggregation: Theory and experiment." Journal of Public Economics 134 (2016): 114-128.
Bouton, Laurent, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Antonin Macé, and Dimitrios Xefteris. "Voting Rights, Agenda Control and Information Aggregation." Journal of European Economic Association (2024), forthcoming.
Campbell, Joseph, Alessandra Casella, Lucas de Lara, Victoria R. Mooers, and Dilip Ravindran. Liquid democracy. Two experiments on delegation in voting. No. w30794. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022.
Casella, Alessandra, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, and Thomas R. Palfrey. "Competitive equilibrium in markets for votes." Journal of Political Economy 120, no. 4 (2012): 593-658.
Casella, Alessandra, and Antonin Macé. "Does vote trading improve welfare?." Annual Review of Economics 13 (2021): 57-86.
Dhillon, Amrita, Grammateia Kotsialou, Dilip Ravindran, and Dimitrios Xefteris. "Information aggregation with delegation of votes." arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03960 (2023).
Eguia, Jon X., and Dimitrios Xefteris. "Implementation by vote-buying mechanisms." American economic review 111, no. 9 (2021): 2811-2828.
Esteban, Joan M., and Debraj Ray. "Collective action and the group size paradox." American Political Science Review 95, no. 3: 663.
Feddersen, Timothy J., and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. "The swing voter's curse." The American economic review (1996): 408-424.
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Herrera, Helios, Massimo Morelli, and Thomas Palfrey. "Turnout and power sharing." The Economic Journal 124, no. 574 (2014): F131-F162.
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Palfrey, Thomas R., and Howard Rosenthal. "Voter participation and strategic uncertainty." American political science review 79, no. 1 (1985): 62-78.
Tsakas, Nikolas, and Dimitrios Xefteris. "Information aggregation with runoff voting." Journal of Economic Theory 191 (2021a): 105130.
Tsakas, Nikolas, Dimitrios Xefteris, and Nicholas Ziros. "Vote trading in power-sharing systems: A laboratory investigation." The Economic Journal 131, no. 636 (2021): 1849-1882.