Voting over economic plans

We review and provide motivation for a one-sector model of economic growth in which decisions about capital accumulation are made by a political process. If it is possible to commit for at least three periods into the future, then for any feasible consumption plan, there is a perturbation that is majority-preferred to it. Furthermore, plans that minimize the maximum vote that can be obtained against them yield a political business cycle. If it is impossible to commit, voters select the optimal consumption plan for the median voter

Covering, Dominance, and Institution Free Properties of Social Change

This paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar, so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules. Specifically, in a multidimensional setting, where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences, it is shown that the "uncovered set" contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings. The three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate, cooperative behavior in small committees, and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously. Because of its apparent institution free properties, the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist. A general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven, and for the Downsian case, bounds for the uncovered set are computed. These bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

Game Forms for Nash Implementation of General Social Choice Correspondences

Several game forms are given for implementing general social choice correspondences (SCC's) which satisfy Haskin's conditions of monotonicity and No Veto Power. The game forms have smaller strategy spaces than those used in previously discovered mechanisms: the strategy for an individual consists of an alternative, two subsets (of alternatives), and a player number. For certain types of economic and political SCC's, including a-majority rule, the Walrasian, and Lindahl correspondence, the strategy space reduces to an alternative and a vector, where the number of components of the vector is at most twice the dimension of the alternative space

Structural Instability of the Core

Let σ be a q-rule, where any coalition of size q, from the society of size n, is decisive. Let w(n,q)=2q-n+1 and let W be a smooth ‘policy space’ of dimension w. Let U〖(W)〗^N be the space of all smooth profiles on W, endowed with the Whitney topology. It is shown that there exists an ‘instability dimension’ w*(σ) with 2≦w*(σ)≦w(n,q) such that: 1. (i) if w≧w*(σ), and W has no boundary, then the core of σ is empty for a dense set of profiles in U(W)N (i.e., almost always), 2. (ii) if w≧w*(σ)+1, and W has a boundary, then the core of σ is empty, almost always, 3. (iii) if w≧w*(σ)+1, then the cycle set is dense in W, almost always, 4. (iv) if w≧w*(σ)+2 then the cycle set is also path connected, almost always. The method of proof is first of all to show that if a point belongs to the core, then certain generalized symmetry conditions in terms of ‘pivotal’ coalitions of size 2q-n must be satisfied. Secondly, it is shown that these symmetry conditions can almost never be satisfied when either W has empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q) or when W has non-empty boundary and is of dimension w(n,q)+1

Generalized symmetry conditions at a core point

Previous analyses have shown that if a point is to be a core of a majority rule voting game in Euclidean space, when preferences are smooth, then the utility gradients at the point must satisfy certain restrictive symmetry conditions. In this paper, these results are generalized to the case of an arbitrary voting rule, and necessary and sufficient conditions, expressed in terms of the utility gradients of "pivotal" coalitions, are obtained

Public and Private Information: An Experimental Study of Information Pooling

This paper reports on an experimental study of-the way in which individuals make inferences from publicly available information. We compare the predictions of a theoretical model of a common knowledge inference process with actual behavior. In the theoretical model, "perfect Bayesians," starting with private information, take actions; an aggregate statistic is made publicly available; the individuals do optimal Bayesian updating and take new actions; and the process continues until there is a common knowledge equilibrium with complete information pooling. We find that the theoretical model roughly predicts the observed behavior, but the actual inference process is clearly less efficient than the standard of the theoretical model, and while there is some pooling, it is incomplete

Status Quo Bias in Bargaining: An extension of the Myerson Satterthwaite Theorem with an application to the Coase Theorem

We use a generalized version of the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem to study inefficiencies in bilateral bargaining over trade of an indivisible good, where there is two sided private information on the valuations. We show that when preferences are convex and quasi linear, and when the private information represents the magnitude of the utility gain or loss and follows a uniform distribution, that the most efficient mechanism always exhibits a bias towards the status quo. In the case that utility functions are quadratic in the amount traded, we prove that for any incentive compatible direct mechanism, there is an expected bias towards the disagreement point. In other words, for the class of preferences we study, there is a strategic advantage to property rights in the Coase bargaining setup in the presence of incomplete information

Engodeneity of Alternating Offers in a Bargaining Game

We investigate an infinite horizon two-person simultaneous offer bargaining game of incomplete information with discounted playoffs. In each period, each player chooses to give in or hold out. The game continues until at least one of the players chooses to give in, at which point agreement has been reached and the game terminates, with an agreement benefit accruing to each player, and a cost to the player (or players) that give in. Players have privately known agreement benefits. 'Low benefit players have a weakly dominant strategy to hold out forever; high benefit players would be better off giving in if they knew their opponent was planning to hold out forever. For any discount factor there is a unique Nash equilibrium in which the two players alternate in their willingness to give in, if the players' priors about each others type are sufficiently asymmetric. Second, for almost all priors, this is the unique equilibrium if the discount factor is close enough to one