Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?

Alessandra Casella and Antonin Macé

PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL

Abstract: Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, acquiring others' votes when preferences are strong in exchange for giving votes away when preferences are weak. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing? For a practice long believed to be central to collective decisions, the lack of a clear answer is surprising. We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling - the exchange of votes for votes. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions - to trade votes with oneself only. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions.

Keywords: Bundling; Quadratic voting; Logrolling; Vote trading; Storable votes; Vote markets; logrolling; vote trading; storable votes; quadratic voting; bundling; vote markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02922012v2
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Annual Review of Economics, 2021, ⟨10.1146/annurev-economics-081720-114422⟩

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Journal Article: Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare? (2021)
Working Paper: Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare? (2021)
Working Paper: Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare? (2020)
Working Paper: Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare? (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-02922012

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-economics-081720-114422

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