On the Buyability of Voting Bodies: John Morgan and Felix Várdy; IMF Workind Paper 07/165, July 1, 2007

On the Buyability of Voting Bodies

We study vote buying by competing interest groups in a variety of electoral and contractual settings. While increasing the size of a voting body reduces its buyability in the absence of competition, we show that larger voting bodies may be more buyable than smaller voting bodies when interest groups compete. In contrast, imposing the secret ballot is an effective way to fight vote buying in the...

Corruption, Competition, and Contracts: A Model of Vote Buying; John Morgan and Felix Várdy; IMF Working Paper 06/11; January 1, 2006

Distributional Implications of the VAT Reform in the Philippines: David Newhouse and Daria Zakharova, IMF Workind Paper 07/153, July 1, 2007

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the authors and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper assesses the distributional impact of the recent VAT r...

Passion over Reason? Mixed Motives and the Optimal Size of Voting Bodies∗

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven by instrumental as well as expressive motives. We show that arbitrarily small amounts of expressive motives significantly affect equilibrium behavior and the optimal size of voting bodies. Increasing the size of voting bodies always reduces accuracy over some region. Unless conflict between expressive and instrumental preferences is very l...

Some Remarks on Dodgson's Voting Rule

Sparked by a remarkable result due to Hemaspaandra et al. [1], the voting rule attributed to Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) has become one of the most studied voting rules in computational social choice. However, the computer science literature often neglects that Dodgson’s rule has some serious shortcomings as a choice procedure. This short note contains four examples revealing Dodgson’s ...