Voting Games: An Experimental Investigation

Friedel Bolle and Philipp E. Otto

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 2020, vol. 176, issue 3, 496-525

Abstract: The central institution in democracies and shareholder firms is decision-making by voting. If all voters made decisions as if their vote were decisive, then true majority decisions would be obtained with certainty. Often, however, voters have incentives to hide their true preferences, thus preventing true majorities. In addition to mixed-strategy equilibria, in most voting games there is a unique pure-strategy equilibrium where all voters decide oppositely to their true preferences. Experimental behavior, however, clearly differs from any unique equilibrium and more often implies true majority decisions than unique pure-strategy equilibria predict.

Keywords: voting games; sincere voting; equilibrium selection; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D58 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/voting-game ... 101628jite-2020-0030
Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.

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:mhr:jinste:urn:doi:10.1628/jite-2020-0030

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG, P.O.Box 2040, 72010 Tübingen, Germany

DOI: 10.1628/jite-2020-0030

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) is currently edited by Gerd Mühlheußer and Bayer, Ralph-C

More articles in Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) from Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Wolpert ().