A passion for voting

We model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters. A voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it. We find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting. Public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects. When the signal is sufficiently strong, the majority outcome is biased. This is a possible reason for persistence of public policies.     

Sequential voting with abstention

Dekel and Piccione [2000. Sequential voting procedures in symmetric binary elections. J. Polit. Economy 108, 34–55] have proven that information cascades do not necessarily affect the properties of information aggregation in sequential elections: under standard conditions, any symmetric equilibrium of a simultaneous voting mechanism is also an equilibrium of the correspondent sequential mechanism. We show that when voters can abstain, these results are sensitive to the introduction of an arbitrarily small cost of voting: the set of equilibria in the two mechanisms are generally disjoint; and the informative properties of the equilibrium sets can be ranked. If an appropriate q-rule is chosen, when the cost of voting is small the unique symmetric equilibrium of the simultaneous voting mechanism dominates all equilibria of the sequential mechanism.     

The ratio equilibrium and a voting game in a public goods economy

An economic model of the allocation process with public goods is presented. We define a concept of equilibrium and prove the existence. Next we present a voting game in which a level of the public goods to be produced is decided. We prove that the core of the voting game and the equilibria exist simultaneously, and that they coincide.     

Protecting Minorities through the Average Voting Rule

In the average voting rule, the outcome is some weighted average of votes. The unique average voting outcome is characterized by a median formula, which depends on voters' preferred allocations and some parameters constructed from voters' weights. A minority is said to be protected by a switch in voting rule if the outcome becomes closer to the median bliss point of the minority. Sufficient conditions for minority protection are that, either the minority's weight is sufficiently large or the majority outcome is too unfavorable to the minority. Applications to the composition of public goods and to public expenditures level are considered. We explore the combined use of average and majority voting in a two‐stage procedure for determining the level and the composition of public expenditures.     

Demand bargaining and proportional payoffs in majority games

We study a majoritarian bargaining model in which players make payoff demands in decreasing order of voting weight. The unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome is such that the minimal winning coalition of the players that move first forms with payoffs proportional to the voting weights. This result advances previous analysis in terms of one or more of the following: a) the simplicity of the extensive form (finite horizon with a predetermined order of moves); b) the range of the majority games covered; c) the equilibrium concept (subgame perfect equilibrium is sufficient for a unique prediction).     

Public goods,voting, and growth

We study a parametric politico‐economic model of economic growth with productive public goods and public consumption goods. The provision of public goods is funded by a proportional tax. Agents are heterogeneous in their initial capital endowments, discount factors, and the relative weights of public consumption in overall private utility. They vote on the shares of public goods in gross domestic products (GDP). We propose a definition of voting equilibrium, prove the existence and provide a characterization of voting equilibria, and obtain a closed‐form solution for the voting outcomes. Also we introduce a “fictitious” representative agent and interpret the outcome of voting as a choice made by a central planner for his benefit. Finally, we undertake comparative static analysis of the shares of public goods in GDP and of the rate of balanced growth with respect to the discount factors and the preferences for public consumption. The results of this analysis suggest that the representative‐agent version of our model is capable of capturing the interaction between many voting heterogeneous agents only if the heterogeneity is one‐dimensional.     

Endogenous Public Expenditures on Education

We construct a model of the determination of public funding of education through majority voting. Households have the option of privately supplementing public education. Alternatively, they can opt out of public education completely and choose private education. We find that in general the single‐crossing property cannot be used to establish existence of a majority voting equilibrium. Numerical solutions of the model reveal (i) when public education inputs and private supplements are substitutes, private school enrollment is often zero; and (ii) the funding level for public education is very sensitive to the productivity of private supplements and the elasticity of substitution between public inputs and private supplements.     

Composition of Government Budget, Non-Single Peakedness, and Majority Voting

In this paper we study whether majority voting equilibria exist when preferences over public policies are not single peaked. The government levies a proportional income tax. Tax revenue is used to finance a uniform lump-sum transfer and public education. Individuals vote on the composition of the government budget. We show that the single-crossing property cannot be invoked to establish existence of a majority voting equilibrium. In a simple parametric example we find that cycles are pervasive.     

On the importance of public choice in migration models

"Recent general equilibrium Tiebout models that use single-crossing indifference curves to establish a migration equilibrium incorporate both voting and migration decisions. These models have concentrated on the important question of the existence of an equilibrium, but the incorporation of both voting and migration has important efficiency consequences as well. This paper demonstrates the important effect of the interaction of voting and migration on efficiency conditions by showing that head taxes (which are generally considered to provide efficient migration incentives with constant marginal congestion costs) do not provide incentives for efficient migration decisions unless the public choice mechanism results in optimal public service provision within jurisdictions."     

A voting model for the allocation of public goods: Existence of an equilibrium

It is well known that equilibria may not exist for majority voting over multidimensional policy spaces. This paper shows that certain institutional constraints can be imposed upon the voting process to ensure existence of a restricted equilibrium. A restricted equilibrium point must defeat only those points connected to it by one of an exogenously given set of linearly independent voting vectors. Using this procedure in a general equilibrium model to determine demands for public goods, existence of a general political equilibrium is proven. The equilibrium need not be Pareto optimal and may be manipulated by changing the vectors.     

Group play in games and the role of consent in network formation

We study games played between groups of players, where a given group decides which strategy it will play through a vote by its members. When groups consist of two voting players, our games can also be interpreted as network-formation games. In experiments on Stag Hunt games, we find a stark contrast between how groups and individuals play, with payoffs playing a primary role in equilibrium selection when individuals play, but the structure of the voting rule playing the primary role when groups play. We develop a new solution concept, robust-belief equilibrium, which explains the data that we observe. We provide results showing that this solution concept has application beyond the particular games in our experiments.     

Voting with abstention

Most voting models in the literature neglect abstention, but is such a simplification justified? I investigate this question in a model with outside pressure on voters. For sequential voting (e.g., roll call votes), with and without an abstention option, there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, which implies that true majorities always succeed. Abstention can be an equilibrium strategy for some voters, in particular under complex decision rules (e.g., weighted voting, double majorities). Simultaneous voting often has a unique pure strategy equilibrium but also a plethora of mixed and pure/mixed strategy equilibria. Therefore, only with equilibrium selection, can we evaluate the consequences of neglecting abstention. For equal weight voting, equilibria selected by the procedure of Harsanyi and Selten change completely with an abstention option, even if abstention itself is not or rarely used. With small enough outside pressure, however, the selected equilibrium honors true majorities in both cases.     

Local public good provision: Voting,peer effects,and mobility

Few empirical strategies have been developed that investigate public provision under majority rule while taking explicit account of the constraints implied by mobility of households. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of voting in local communities when neighborhood quality depends on peer or neighborhood effects. We develop a new empirical approach which allows us to impose all restrictions that arise from locational equilibrium models with myopic voting simultaneously on the data generating process. We can then analyze how close myopic models come in replicating the main regularities about expenditures, taxes, sorting by income and housing observed in the data. We find that a myopic voting model that incorporates peer effects fits all dimensions of the data reasonably well.     

An Incentive‐Compatible Condorcet Jury Theorem*

We consider a group of individuals who face a binary collective decision. Each group member holds some private information, and all agree about what decision should be taken in each state of nature. However, the state is unknown, and members can differ in their valuations of the two types of mistakes that might occur, and in their prior beliefs about the true state. For a slightly randomized majority rule, we show that informative voting by all voters is the unique Nash equilibrium, that this equilibrium is strict, and that the Condorcet asymptotic efficiency result holds in this setting.     

Existence of voting-market equilibria

We show the existence of an equilibrium in a model where private goods are allocated by markets and the public good (bad) is allocated by majority rule voting.     

Equilibrium among local jurisdictions: toward an integrated treatment of voting and residential choice

In models of local public goods with mobile consumers, existence of equilibrium is problematic. Difficulties with existence of equilibrium that arise in models with discrete locations and in models with voting are compounded when both features are introduced into the same model. We present conditions under which equilibrium exists in a model where freely mobile households choose community of residence and amount of housing consumption, and vote on the level of public goods provision. These conditions involve restrictions on preferences and the technology of public goods supply. At least some of these conditions appear consistent with empirical observations. We discuss the implications of the conditions, and their role in assuring existence of equilibrium. A series of computational examples provide illustrations of the way these conditions interact, and the difficulties that must be confronted if they are to be relaxed.     

Voting by Successive Elimination and Strategic Candidacy

We study the impact of strategic choices of self-interested candidates of whether or not to enter an election. We focus on strategic candidacy in the context of the tree and binary voting procedures used by small groups such as committees. We offer a comprehensive analysis for the special but important case of voting by successive elimination. Strategic candidacy slightly enlarges the set of candidates that can be equilibrium outcomes relative to the traditional analysis which takes the set of candidates as fixed. Pareto-dominated candidates can be elected in equilibrium under voting by successive elimination when strategic candidacy is considered, in contrast with a fixed set of candidates. Journal of Economic Litterature Classification Numbers: D71, D72.     

Uniqueness of stationary equilibria in bargaining one-dimensional policies under (super) majority rules

We consider negotiations selecting one-dimensional policies. Individuals have instantaneous preferences represented by continuous, concave and single-peaked utility functions, and they are impatient. Decisions arise from a bargaining game with random proposers and (super) majority approval, ranging from the simple majority up to unanimity. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the existence of a unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium, and we provide its explicit characterization. The uniqueness of the equilibrium permits an analysis of the set of Pareto optimal voting rules. For symmetric distributions of peaks and uniform recognition probabilities unanimity is the unanimously preferred majority rule.     

The determination of public tuition fees in a mixed education system: A majority voting model

We study the determination of public tuition fees through majority voting in a vertical differentiation model where agents' returns on educational investment differ and public and private universities coexist and compete in tuition fees. The private university offers higher educational quality than its competitor, incurring higher unit cost per trained student. The tuition fee for the state university is fixed by majority voting while that for the private follows from profit maximization. Then agents choose to train at the public university or the private one or to remain uneducated. The tax per head adjusts in order to balance the state budget. Because there is a private alternative, preferences for education are not single‐peaked and no single‐crossing condition holds. An equilibrium is shown to exist, which is one of three types: high tuition fee (the “ends” are a majority), low tuition fee (the “middle” is a majority), or mixed (votes tie). The cost structure determines which equilibrium obtains. The equilibrium tuition is either greater (majority at the ends) or smaller (majority at the middle) than the optimal one.     

Post-compulsory education: Participation and politics

In a much-cited paper Fernandez and Rogerson (1995) suggest that public spending on higher education is politically sustained by middle- and high income groups voting for a policy which is positive but not generous enough to allow lower income families to overcome the financial constraints that prevent their participation. Using a quantitative model, calibrated to the UK economy, we find that current public spending on post compulsory education corresponds to a political equilibrium. Support for the equilibrium policy comes primarily from low- and middle income groups, indicating that the policy needn't be highly regressive. Credit constraints play a minor role.