Why votes have value: Instrumental voting with overconfidence and overestimation of others' errors

Ingolf Dittmann, Dorothea Kübler, Ernst Maug and Lydia Mechtenberg

Games and Economic Behavior, 2014, vol. 84, issue C, 17-38

Abstract: We perform an experiment in which subjects bid for participating in a vote. The setting precludes conflicts of interests or direct benefits from voting. The theoretical value of participating in the vote is therefore zero if subjects have only instrumental reasons to vote and form correct beliefs. Yet, we find that experimental subjects are willing to pay for the vote and that they do so for instrumental reasons. The observed voting premium in the main treatment is high and can only be accounted for if some subjects either overestimate their pivotality or do not pay attention to pivotality at all. A model of instrumental voting, which assumes that individuals are overconfident and that they overestimate the errors of others, is consistent with results from treatments that make the issue of pivotality salient to experimental subjects.

Keywords: Voting; Experimental economics; Overconfidence; Pivotality; Cognitive biases (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D72 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982561300170X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:84:y:2014:i:c:p:17-38

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2013.12.004

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).