Designing referenda: an economist's pessimistic perspective

DOI10.1016/J.JET.2020.105133MaRDI QIDQ1995292zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Siyang Xiong

Publication date 23 February 2021

Published in Journal of Economic Theory (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2020.105133

zbMATH Keywords

dictatorNash equilibriareferendumsocial choice

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Cooperative games (91A12) Social choice (91B14)

Review text

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.

Recommendations

• Ensuring Pareto optimality by referendum voting
• Robust mechanism design and dominant strategy voting rules
• Optimal voting rules
• Subgame perfect implementation of voting rules via randomized mechanisms
• Voting under constraints

Cites work

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Cited in

(6)

• Self-implementation of social choice correspondences in Nash equilibrium
• Majority rip-off in referendum voting
• Robust mechanism design and dominant strategy voting rules
• A method for identifying parameterizations of the compensation election and quadratic voting that admit pure-strategy equilibria
• Referenda as a catch-22
• Strengthening incentives for truth-telling in majority voting

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