INFORMATION AGGREGATION, COSTLY VOTING AND COMMON VALUES

Sayantan Ghosal and Ben Lockwood

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: In a model of majority voting with common values and costly but voluntary participation, we show that in the vicinity of equilibrium, it is always Pareto-improving for more agents, on the average, to vote. This demonstrates that the negative voting externality identified by Borgers(2001) in the context of private values is always dominated by a positive informational externality. In addition, we show that multiple Pareto-ranked voting equilibria may exist and moreover, majority voting with compulsory participation can Pareto dominate majority voting with voluntary participation. Finally, we show that the inefficiency result is robust to limited preference heterogeneity

Keywords: Voting; information; pivot; externality; inefficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:670

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