Balancing the power to appoint officers

Rules of k names are frequently used methods to appoint individuals to o¢ ce. They are two-stage procedures where a …rst set of agents, the proposers, select k individuals from an initial set of candidates, and then another agent, the chooser, appoints one among those k in the list. In practice, the list of k names is often arrived at by letting each of the proposers screen the proposed candidates by voting for v of them and then choose those k with the highest support. We then speak of v -rules of k names. Our main purpose in this paper is to study how di¤erent choices of the parametrs v and k a¤ect the balance of power between the proposers and the choosers. From a positive point of view, we analyze a strategic game where the proposers interact to determine what list of candidates to submit. From a normative point of view, we study the performance of di¤erent rules in expected terms, under di¤erent informational assumptions. The choice of v and k is then analyzed from the perspectives of e¢ ciency, fairness and compromise. Key Words: Voting rules, Constitutional Design, Strong Nash equilibrium, Rule of k Names. JEL classi…cation: D02, D71, D72. Some materials in this paper have been circulated in preliminary drafts under the title "Choosing among rules of k names". [email protected] and [email protected]. The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grant "Consolidated Group-C" ECO200804756 and FEDER, from the Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació through the Distinció per a la Promoció de la Recerca Universitària and grant SGR20090419. Salvador Barbarà acknowledges …nancial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-20110075). We thank Miguel Ballester, Alexandre Carvalho, Anke Gerber, Matthew Jackson and Carmelo Rodríguez-Álvarez for useful comments.