The winner-take-all dilemma

Kazuya Kikuchi () and Yukio Koriyama
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Kazuya Kikuchi: World Language and Society Education Center, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Theoretical Economics, 2023, vol. 18, issue 3

Abstract: We consider collective decision making when society consists of groups endowed with voting weights. Each group chooses an internal rule that specifies the allocation of its weight to alternatives as a function of its members' preferences. Under fairly general conditions, we show that the winner-take-all rule is a dominant strategy, while the equilibrium is Pareto dominated, highlighting the dilemma structure between optimality for each group and for the whole society. We also develop a technique for asymptotic analysis and show Pareto dominance of the proportional rule.

Keywords: Representative democracy; winner-take-all rule; proportional rule; prisoner's dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D70 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-07-20
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Winner-Take-All Dilemma (2022)
Working Paper: The Winner-Take-All Dilemma (2019)
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