Implementation by vote-buying mechanisms

Jon Eguia and Dimitrios Xefteris

University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics

Abstract: A vote-buying mechanism is such that each agent buys a quantity of votes x to cast for an alternative of her choosing, at a cost c(x), and the outcome is determined by the total number of votes cast for each alternative. In the context of binary decisions, we prove that the choice rules that can be implemented by vote-buying mechanisms in large societies are parameterized by a positive parameter rho, which measures the importance of individual preference intensities on the social choice: The limit with rho= 0 is majority rule, rho = 1 is utilitarianism, and rho?8 is the Rawlsian maximin rule. We show that any vote-buying mechanism with limit cost elasticity (1 rho)/rho as x?0 implements the choice rule defined by rho. The utilitarian efficiency of quadratic voting (Lalley and Weyl, 2016) follows as a special case.

Keywords: implementation; mechanism design; vote-buying; social welfare; utilitarianism; quadratic voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Implementation by Vote-Buying Mechanisms (2021)
Working Paper: Implementation by vote-buying mechanisms (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucy:cypeua:04-2018

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