Social Learning in a Common Interest Voting Game

This paper describes the experimental results of a dynamic voting game. Subjects are induced with common preferences, but have asymmetric and incomplete information about the payoff-generating behavior of two available proposals. The election process serves as a mechanism to gather the dispersed information. It is shown that subjects are more effective in coordinating their decisions to a socially optimal equilibrium when they get more experienced. The way they succeed in doing this is by paying less attention to the popularity of a proposal.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D72, D82.