Information sharing in democratic mechanisms

Volker Britz () and Hans Gersbach
Additional contact information
Volker Britz: CER-ETH, Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich

International Journal of Game Theory, 2020, vol. 49, issue 2, No 8, 547-577

Abstract: Abstract We examine how democratic mechanisms can yield socially desirable outcomes in the presence of uncertainty about an underlying state of nature. We depart from a conventional mechanism design approach because we aim for democratic mechanisms to reflect some basic properties of decision-making in democracies. In particular, actual decisions are made by majority voting. The proposals to be voted upon are made by a selfish agenda-setter. Moreover, communication is limited to a binary message space (that is, voting Yes or No). We show how suitable democratic mechanisms can resolve uncertainty, reveal the state of nature, and implement the Condorcet winner. We demonstrate that this implementation result requires (at most) two voting stages regardless of the number of states or the number of alternatives. We also show that implementation requires a conditional privilege for a small representative subset of the population.

Keywords: Democratic mechanisms; Polling; Sampling; Public goods; Voting; Information sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D72 H40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00182-020-00708-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jogath:v:49:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s00182-020-00708-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/182/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00182-020-00708-2

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Game Theory is currently edited by Shmuel Zamir, Vijay Krishna and Bernhard von Stengel

More articles in International Journal of Game Theory from Springer, Game Theory Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().