Designing referenda: an economist's pessimistic perspective (Q1995292)

This paper discusses voting mechanisms in a two-outcomes environment taking a game-theoretical approach. It is shown that, in different setups, a large class of voting rules, called voting mechanisms, which includes the majority voting rule, are implementable in Nash equilibrium if and only if they are dictatorial. The impossibility result no longer holds if the standard Nash equilibrium is replaced with a refined equilibrium notion that eliminates weakly dominated strategies, e.g., dominant Nash equilibria and undominated Nash equilibria. It can be generalized to setups of incomplete information and other equilibrium notions, e.g., correlated equilibria). The impossibility result is also extended to a stochastic version of voting mechanisms.