Qualitative Voting

Rafael Hortalà-Vallvé
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Rafael Hortalà-Vallvé: London School of Economics

Cuadernos de Economía - Spanish Journal of Economics and Finance, 2010, vol. 33, issue 92, 5-44

Abstract: Can we devise mechanisms that allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences when monetary transfers are forbidden? Can minorities be decisive over those issues they feel very strongly about? As opposed to the usual voting system (one person-one decision-one vote), we propose a voting system where each agent is endowed with a fixed number of votes that can be distributed freely among a set of issues that need to be approved or dismissed. Its novelty relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. This voting system is optimal in a well-defined sense: in a strategic setting with two voters, two issues and preference intensities uniformly and independently distributed across possible values, Qualitative Voting Pareto dominates Majority Rule and, moreover, achieves the only ex-ante optimal (incentive compatible) allocation. The result also holds true with three voters as long as the voters preferences towards the issues differ sufficiently.

Keywords: Votar; problema de intensidad; alternativas a la regla de la mayoría; resolución de conflictos. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D70 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cud:journl:v:33:y:2010:i:92:p:5-44

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