Stress-Testing the Runoff Rule in the Laboratory

Nikolas Tsakas and Dimitrios Xefteris

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

Abstract: When a majority of voters has common values, but private information, then the runoff rule always admits an equilibrium that aggregates information strictly better than the best equilibrium of the plurality rule. But there are cases in which the plurality rule supports equilibria that are strictly better compared to certain undominated equilibria of the runoff rule. Is there any risk with applying the runoff rule in these situations? We conduct a laboratory experiment and we show that the runoff rule consistently delivers better outcomes than the plurality rule even in such unfavorable scenarios. This establishes that the superiority of the runoff rule over the plurality rule in empirical settings outperforms its theoretical advantages.

Keywords: runoff voting; plurality rule; information aggregation; Condorcet jury theorem; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.econ.ucy.ac.cy/RePEc/papers/10-19.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Stress-testing the runoff rule in the laboratory (2021)
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:ucy:cypeua:10-2019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics from University of Cyprus Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().