上市公司财务虚假的成因--基于股东投票权完备性角度的研究

我国上市公司财务虚假的主要表现形式有利润操纵、利益转移、借关联交易调控损益以及少分配和不分配现金股利。而大股东投票权的非完备性:拥有股权的不可交易性,成为上市公司财务虚假的根本原因。     

The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids

Suppose legislators represent districts of varying population, and their assembly's voting rule is intended to implement the principle of one person, one vote. How should legislators' voting weights appropriately reflect these population differences? An analysis requires an understanding of the relationship between voting weight and some measure of the influence that each legislator has over collective decisions. We provide three new characterizations of weighted voting that embody this relationship. Each is based on the intuition that winning coalitions should be close to one another. The locally minimal and tightly packed characterizations use a weighted Hamming metric. Ellipsoidal separability employs the Euclidean metric: a separating hyper-ellipsoid contains all winning coalitions, and omits losing ones. The ellipsoid's proportions, and the Hamming weights, reflect the ratio of voting weight to influence, measured as Penrose–Banzhaf voting power. In particular, the spherically separable rules are those for which voting powers can serve as voting weights.     

Are voters rational?

We test whether a voter's decision to cast a vote depends on its probability of affecting the election outcome. Using exogenous variation arising at population cutoffs determining council sizes in Finnish municipal elections, we show that larger council size increases both pivotal probabilities and turnout. These effects are statistically significant, fairly large and robust. Finally, we use a novel instrumental variables design to show that the jumps in the pivotal probabilities are the likely candidate for explaining the increase in turnout, rather than the other observed simultaneous jumps at the council size cutoffs. Moreover, our results indicate that turnout responds only to within-party pivotal probabilities, perhaps because they are more salient to the voters than the between-party ones.     

Maximin choice of voting rules for committees

In the context of a probabilistic voting model with dichotomous choice, we investigate the consequences of choosing among voting rules according to the maximin criterion. A voting rule is the minimum number of voters who vote favorably on a change from the status quo required for it to be adopted. We characterize the voting rules that satisfy the maximin criterion as a function of the distribution of voters’ probabilities to favor change from the status quo. We prove that there are at most two maximin voting rules, at least one is Pareto efficient and is often different to the simple majority rule. If a committee is formed only by “conservative voters” (i.e. voters who are more likely to prefer the status quo to change) then the maximin criterion recommends voting rules that require no more voters supporting change than the simple majority rule. If there are only “radical voters”, then this criterion recommends voting rules that require no less than half of the total number of votes.Received: June 2003, Accepted: September 2004, JEL Classification: D71Salvador Barberá, Carmen Beviá, Mirko Cardinale, Wioletta Dziuda, Joan Esteban, Mahmut Erdem, Bernard Grofman, Matthew Jackson, Kai Konrad, Raul Lopez, Jordi Massó, Hugh Mullan, Shmuel Nitzan, Ana Pires do Prado, Elisabeth Schulte, Arnold Urken and two anonymous referees provided helpful comments. Finally, I also acknowledge financial support from Capes, Brazilian Ministry of Education and Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Project BEC2002-02130).     

A Note on the Probability of Having a Strong Condorcet Winner

In an election, a strong Condorcet winner is a candidate who is top-ranked by more than 50% of the voters. The purpose of this note is to provide some algebraic representations for the probability of having a strong Condorcet winner in three-candidate elections. Three alternative procedures for generating voting situations are considered: the Impartial Culture condition, the Impartial Anonymous Culture condition and the Maximal Culture condition. It turns out that the conclusions we obtain strongly depend on the way for generating voting situations.     

Condorcet's Jury Theorem and the reliability of majority voting

The effect on the Jury Theorem of dependency among votes is discussed. Condorcet's original model and theorem depend crucially on the assumption of independence and the applicability of the binomial distribution. Two simple extensions of the binomial distribution are used to illustrate the effects of dependency on the quality of group decision making. With the correlated binomial model, it is possible to isolate the effect of pairwise dependency. In the presence of fairly strong pairwise dependency, we are not even guaranteed the natural property of monotonicity with respect to voters. A Pólya-Eggenberger model illustrates the effect of contagion on group competence. A special case of the beta-binomial distribution is used to demonstrate that, even in the presence of synergetic group effects, we are not guaranteed infallible decisions from a very large group. Consequences for an epistemic theory of democracy are indicated.