This accomplishment based renewal proposal for continued research in the design of mechanisms or institutions for collective decision-making, ranging from voting systems to markets. The literature on this subject usually takes the decision problem and set of possible decisions to be exogenous. The research under this project focuses on situations where agents have discretion in what the set of alternatives are, what the decision problem itself is, and even which mechanism they will use to make a decision.
The first part of the research studies how societies might gain by linking decisions across different collective decision problems. In studying collective decision-making, the decision problem is taken as exogenous. However, by linking the decisions over different, possibly completely unrelated problems, a society can achieve Pareto improvements relative to making decisions over the same problems in isolation. In particular, it is very helpful in terms of incentives to be able to ask agent's questions like "Which problem do you care more about?" The second part of the research will continue to study how societies choose the voting rules. In particular, it will examine situations where a society makes decisions over projects that may involve a sequence of investments. In such a dynamic voting environment, several interesting cases, including "option-value" considerations, and changes in voting rules that can have non-monotonic effects, arise. This research will identify efficient mechanisms and their relation to the structure of uncertainty, as well as understanding which mechanisms would be selected by the voters themselves to deal with such issues.
The last part of the research looks at a voting procedure where citizens elect representatives who then participate in later votes on their behalf. Here the research will analyze how the votes of the representatives of different groups should be weighed in an efficient rule, as well as how such weights might be selected by participants and how this might affect the choice of who becomes part of a union when the union is first formed.
