Voting in Three-Alternative Committees: An Experiment

Johanna M.M. Goertz and Kirill Chernomaz
Additional contact information
Johanna M.M. Goertz: Department of Economics and Finance, Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics, University of Guelph, 50 Stone Road East, Guelph ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Kirill Chernomaz: Department of Economics, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA

Games, 2019, vol. 10, issue 2, 1-23

Abstract: We design an experiment to test how voters vote in a small committee election with three alternatives. Voters have common preferences that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal prior to the election and then casts a vote. The alternative with the most votes wins. We fix the number of voters in our experiment to be five and focus on differences in the information structure (prior and signal distributions). We test three different treatments (different prior and signal distributions) that pose different challenges for the voters. In one, simply voting for one’s signal is an equilibrium. In the other two, it is not. Despite the different levels of complexity for the voters, they come relatively close to the predicted strategies (that sometimes involve mixing). As a consequence, the efficiency of the decision is also relatively high and comes close to predicted levels. In one variation of the experiment, we calculate posterior beliefs for the subjects and post them. In another, we do not. Interestingly, the important findings do not change.

Keywords: committees; efficient information aggregation; simple plurality rule; Condorcet jury theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/10/2/20/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/10/2/20/ (text/html)

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:gam:jgames:v:10:y:2019:i:2:p:20-:d:227499

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().