Trading votes for votes: A laboratory study

Alessandra Casella and Thomas R. Palfrey

Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 125, issue C, 1-26

Abstract: Vote trading is ubiquitous in committees and legislatures, and yet we know very little about its properties. We explore this subject with a laboratory experiment. We propose a model of vote trading in which pairs of voters exchange votes whenever doing so is mutually advantageous. The resulting trading dynamics always converge to stable vote allocations–allocations where no further improving trades exist. The data show that stability has predictive power: vote allocations in the lab converge towards stable allocations, and individual vote holdings at the end of trading are in line with theoretical predictions. There is less support for the finer details of the trade-by-trade dynamics.

Keywords: Voting; Vote trading; Logrolling; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825620301457
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:125:y:2021:i:c:p:1-26

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2020.10.004

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 ().