Abortions, Brexit and Trees

Benny Moldovanu () and ,
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Andreas Kleiner ()

No 14183, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We study how parliaments and other committees vote to select one out of several alternatives in situations where not all available options can be ordered along a \left-right" axis. Practically all democratic parliaments routinely use Sequential Binary Voting Procedures in or- der to select one of several alternatives. Which agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed ? We assume that pref- erences are single-peaked on an arbitrary tree and we study convex agendas where, at each stage in the sequential, binary voting process, the tree of remaining alternatives is divided in two subtrees that are subjected to a binary Yes-No vote. In this wide class of situations we show that dynamic, strategic voting is congruent with sincere, unsophisticated voting even if agents are privately informed, and no matter what their beliefs about other voters are. We conclude the paper by illustrating the empirical implications of our results for two large case studies from Germany and from the UK.

Keywords: Voting; Agenda; Revealed preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-des
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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