Weighting Votes: Rule Complexity and Information Aggregation by Aniol Llorente-Sager

Join us for another event in the Microeconomics Research Seminar Series, Autumn Term 2022.

Aniol Llorente-Sager from the School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London will present their research on Weighting Votes: Rule Complexity and Information Aggregation

Abstract

Committees typically decide through voting. One of the challenges of the voting mechanism is to aggregate information when committee members have different quality of information. In such an environment, more complex rules allow voters to better aggregate information by endogenously allocating more decision power to members with better information. We consider two polar examples of voting rules in terms of complexity: majority voting and continuous voting (CV). We compare the mechanisms using laboratory experiments, and we also study participants’ preferences over these. We find that CV does better than majority voting on average, but the difference is lower than theoretically predicted. One of the significant departures from theory is that voters with intermediate information quality attach too much weight on their votes. Communication makes these differences over mechanisms disappear. Finally, despite the higher average welfare under CV, both rules receive similar support.

This seminar will be held in the Economics Common Room on Monday 5 December 2022 at 4pm. This event is open to all levels of study and is also open to the public.

To register your place and gain access to the webinar, please contact the seminar organisers.

This event is part of the Microeconomics Research Seminar Series.