 Information Aggregation in Democratic MechanismsVolker Britz and Hans Gersbach No 5815, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Abstract: We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private information. Some members of the society, however, are harmed by socially desirable policies and aim at manipulating information aggregation by misrepresenting their private information. We show that information can be aggregated and a socially desirable policy can be implemented under a new class of democratic mechanisms involving a sample group. These mechanisms reflect the principles of liberal democracy, are procedurally efficient, and involve a conditional tax privilege of sample group members. This tax treatment motivates sample group members to reveal their private information truthfully before voting takes place. Depending on the distance between two feasible public good levels, the optimal mechanism involves either one or two voting rounds. We show that procedural efficiency cannot be achieved by communication among all citizens prior to voting. Finally, we outline several applications of the mechanism. Keywords: democratic mechanisms; polling; sampling; public goods; voting; information aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_5815 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.