Efficient voting with penalties

Simple majority does not reflect the intensity of voters’ preferences. This paper presents an efficient collective choice mechanism when the choice is binary and the designer may use non-trasferable punishments to persuade agents to reveal their private information. The designer faces a dilemma – a punishment may induce a more correct choice, but its cost is socially wasteful. The efficient mechanism is a weighted majority. Weight of each individual is known ex ante and no punishments applied if preferences are relatively homogenous. Eliciting types through punishments in order to construct type-specific weights should occur if preference intensity is relatively heterogeneous, or if voters preferences represent a larger population. JEL classification: D71, D82