Unanimous rules in the laboratory

We study the information aggregation properties of unanimous voting rules in the laboratory. In line with theoretical predictions, we find that majority rule with veto power dominates unanimity rule. We also find that the strategic voting model is a fairly good predictor of subject behavior. Finally, we exploit a framing effect to study how the presence of less sophisticated agents affects Veto's welfare properties.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Get Rid of Unanimity Rule: The Superiority of Majority Rules with Veto Power

We study unanimous decision making under incomplete information. We argue that all unanimous decision rules are not equivalent. We show that majority rules with veto power are (i) Pareto superior to commonly used unanimous rules, and (ii) ex-ante efficient in a broad class of situations

A rationale for unanimity in committees

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to "idiosyncratic" payoffs that condition on their individual vote, unanimity can facilitate truthful communication and optimal information aggregation. Theoretically, we show that since agents" votes are not always pivotal, majority rule suffers from a free-rider problem. Unanimity mitigates free-riding since responsibility for the committee's decision is equally distributed across all agents. We test our predictions in a controlled laboratory experiment. As predicted, if unanimity is required, subjects are more truthful, respond more to others' messages, and are ultimately more likely to make the optimal decision. Idiosyncratic payoffs such as a moral bias thus present a rationale for the widespread use of unanimous voting

News we like to share : how news sharing on social networks influences voting outcomes

More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals; 2) they naıvely take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different source

Dynamic legislative bargaining with veto power: theory and experiments

In many domains, committees bargain over a sequence of policies and a policy remains in effect until a new agreement is reached. In this paper, I argue that, in order to assess the consequences of veto power, it is important to take into account this dynamic aspect. I analyze an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game with an endogenous status quo policy. I show that full appropriation by the veto player is the only stable policy when legislators are sufficiently impatient; and that, irrespective of legislators' patience and the initial division of resources, there is always an equilibrium where policy eventually gets arbitrarily close to full appropriation by the veto player. In this equilibrium, increasing legislators' patience or decreasing the veto player's proposal power makes convergence to this outcome slower and the veto player supports reforms that decrease his allocation. The main predictions of the theory find support in controlled laboratory experiments