Citation

Discussion Paper Details

Please find the details for DP4081 in an easy to copy and paste format below:

Full Details   |   Bibliographic Reference

Full Details

Title: An Experimental Study of Storable Votes

Author(s): Alessandra Casella, Andrew Gelman and Thomas R Palfrey

Publication Date: October 2003

Keyword(s): committees, experiments, storable votes and voting systems

Programme Area(s): Public Economics

Abstract: The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting 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 multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The 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. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance.

For full details and related downloads, please visit: https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=4081

Bibliographic Reference

Casella, A, Gelman, A and Palfrey, T. 2003. 'An Experimental Study of Storable Votes'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=4081