This project studies strategic voting and committee bargaining mechanisms under conditions of incomplete information from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. Many questions remain unresolved about the general theoretical problem of designing optimal voting mechanisms to efficiently aggregate preferences and information, without explicit side payments, and also about actual behavior under such mechanisms. By combining theoretical and experimental perspectives, the proposed research will make progress with respect to both intellectual challenges. Theoretically, there are questions of the relative performance of different voting mechanisms, where performance can be evaluated relative to several different objectives, including economic efficiency, informational efficiency, and equity.
The proposed research approaches voting behavior from a mechanism design perspective, and compares the performance of different voting mechanisms in different kinds of environments, both dynamic and static. Part of the proposed research involves studying new voting mechanisms that allow voters to express preference intensities over a sequence of decisions, in hopes that these innovations can provide insights that will improve committee decision making. This project models behavior in these environments using both Nash equilibrium and quantal response equilibrium. The laboratory experiments test these general theories of behavior, with an emphasis on the comparative statics predictions and the efficiency properties, and compare the performance of different mechanisms in specific environments. Extensions of these theories are developed. The analysis of the data explore these extended models of limited rationality to help explain where and why the theory seems to be adequate and where and why it misses. From the mechanism design perspective, it is critical to understand the behavioral foundations of strategic voting in order to predict how outcomes will change under different mechanisms. The experimental approach provides guidance in this direction. This project explores several different specifications of limited strategic sophistication, and formally specified models of judgement fallacies, such as base-rate neglect. (2) Broader impacts: In addition to basic research, the proposed research has an education component, by training graduate students in experimental economics and economic theory. The ultimate goal of the research is to better understand how procedures in committees can be modified to improve decision making and overcome obstacles such as conflicting preferences and beliefs, and asymmetric information. This better understanding in the long run can improve performance of organizations and policy-making institutions. The performance of voting procedures are evaluated according to traditional economic welfare criteria, informational efficiency, and equity. There is extensive software development proposed under the grant. This software may be used freely by other researchers in experimental economics and will be publicly available as open source code.
