Voting in three-alternative committees: An experiment

Artikel

We design an experiment to test how voters vote in a small committee election with three alternatives. Voters have common preferences that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal prior to the election and then casts a vote. The alternative with the most votes wins. We fix the number of voters in our experiment to be five and focus on differences in the information structure (prior and signal distributions). We test three different treatments (different prior and signal distributions) that pose different challenges for the voters. In one, simply voting for one's signal is an equilibrium. In the other two, it is not. Despite the different levels of complexity for the voters, they come relatively close to the predicted strategies (that sometimes involve mixing). As a consequence, the efficiency of the decision is also relatively high and comes close to predicted levels. In one variation of the experiment, we calculate posterior beliefs for the subjects and post them. In another, we do not. Interestingly, the important findings do not change.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Games ; ISSN: 2073-4336 ; Volume: 10 ; Year: 2019 ; Issue: 2 ; Pages: 1-23 ; Basel: MDPI

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Noncooperative Games ; Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
• Subject: committees ; efficient information aggregation ; simple plurality rule ; Condorcet jury theorem

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Goertz, Johanna M. M. ; Chernomaz, Kirill
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): MDPI
• (where): Basel
• (when): 2019

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.3390/g10020020
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/219243
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET