TY - JOUR
T1 - Voting as a war of attrition
AU - Kwiek, Maksymilian
AU - Marreiros, Helia
AU - Vlassopoulos, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
This research received support from a University of Southampton SRDF grant and a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant SG142655. We would like to thank José-Alberto Guerra, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Kirill Pogorelskiy, and participants of the Warsaw Economic Seminars 2017, the 18th Meeting of the Association for Public Economic Theory 2017 Paris, the Thurgau Experimental Economics Meeting 2018 in Kreuzlingen, and the Economics Workshop at the University of Southampton 2018 for helpful comments. We also thank Abu Siddique, Larissa Marioni and Armine Ghazaryan for excellent research assistance.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2019/11
Y1 - 2019/11
N2 - We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of their preferences and may help to select the alternative correctly more often than simple majority. In a series of laboratory experiments, we investigate how various rules affect the outcome reached. We vary the amount of feedback and the communication protocol available to voters: complete secrecy about the pattern of support; feedback about this support; public communication; and within-group communication. The feedback no-communication mechanism is worse than no feedback benchmark in all measures of welfare—the efficient alternative is chosen less often, waiting cost is higher, and thus net welfare is lower. Our headline result is that adding communication restores net efficiency, but in different ways. Public communication does poorly in terms of selecting the correct alternative, but limits the cost of delay, while group communication improves allocative efficiency, but has at best a moderate effect on delay.
AB - We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of their preferences and may help to select the alternative correctly more often than simple majority. In a series of laboratory experiments, we investigate how various rules affect the outcome reached. We vary the amount of feedback and the communication protocol available to voters: complete secrecy about the pattern of support; feedback about this support; public communication; and within-group communication. The feedback no-communication mechanism is worse than no feedback benchmark in all measures of welfare—the efficient alternative is chosen less often, waiting cost is higher, and thus net welfare is lower. Our headline result is that adding communication restores net efficiency, but in different ways. Public communication does poorly in terms of selecting the correct alternative, but limits the cost of delay, while group communication improves allocative efficiency, but has at best a moderate effect on delay.
KW - Communication
KW - Conclave
KW - Filibuster
KW - Intensity of preferences
KW - Supermajority
KW - Voting
KW - War of attrition
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85073820952&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.09.020
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.09.020
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85073820952
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 167
SP - 104
EP - 121
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ER -