Working paper
Minorities and storable notes
NBER working paper series, Vol.1164
National Bureau of Economic Research
2005
Abstract
The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desidered over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most important, the minority can win occasionally. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only of its strength of preferences is high and the majority's strength of preferences is low. The result is that aggregate efficiency either falls little or in fact rises. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by a series of experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Minorities and storable notes
- Creators
- Alessandra Casella - Columbia UniversityThomas Palfrey - Princeton UniversityRaymond Riezman
- Resource Type
- Working paper
- Publication Details
- NBER working paper series, Vol.1164
- ISSN
- 0898-2937
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research; Cambridge, MA
- Number of pages
- 43, [5] pages
- Grant note
- We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation, grant number SES-0214013, PLESS, CASSEL, and SSEL. We acknowledge helpful comments from participants of the conference in tribute to Jean-Jacques Laont in Toulouse, June 30- July 2, 2005, the Econometric Society 2005 World Congress in London, and seminars at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Venice, and CORE. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2005
- Academic Unit
- Economics
- Record Identifier
- 9984963189202771
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