The Benefits of Costly Voting

Surajeet Chakravarty, Todd Kaplan and Gareth Myles ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We present a costly voting model in which each voter has a private valuation for their preferred outcome of a vote. When there is a zero cost to voting, all voters vote and hence all values are counted equally regardless of how high they may be. By having a cost to voting, only those with high enough values would choose to incur this cost. Hence, the outcome will be determined by voters with higher valuations. We show that in such a case welfare may be enhanced. Such an effect occurs when there is both a large enough density of voters with low values and a high enough expected value.

Keywords: costly voting; externalities. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21372/1/MPRA_paper_21372.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/58939/11/MPRA_paper_58939.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Benefits of Costly Voting (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:21372

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