Simultaneous and sequential voting under general decision rules

Friedel Bolle

No 394, Discussion Papers from European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Department of Business Administration and Economics

Abstract: In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the "true majority". If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the "true majority" prevails (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010, 2013). In this paper, it is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders) or with multiple necessary majorities (EU decision making). Simultaneous voting in the general model can be plagued by non-existent or non-unique pure strategy equilibria under most preference constellations.

Keywords: voting; free riding; binary decisions; unique equilibria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Simultaneous and sequential voting under general decision rules (2018)
Working Paper: Simultaneous and Sequential Voting under General Decision Rules (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:euvwdp:394

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