Can Voting Solve the Information Problem in Large Elections?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Starting with Feddersen-Pesendorfer (1997), most of the work examining the question of information aggregation under strategic voting has assumed that as the state changes, everyone becomes more (or less) inclined towards one alternative (common values). We show that this assumption is necessary and su¢ cient in delivering the result that voting always aggregates information for any rule. We examine the non-common valuessetting where such a correlation among voter preferences and the state does not hold, and show that for all economically important voting rules, there must be multiple equilibria where, in at least one equilibrium, we get an outcome di¤erent from the full information outcome with a probability arbitrarily close to one. And, for certain voting rules, there is no equilibrium where the full-information outcome is achieved. This result does not depend on the accuracy of the signal, which means that even when there is a small uncertainty about the state, voting can deliver a sure outcome that is di¤erent from what would happen, had the state been known for certain. 0While writing this paper, I have bene ted immensely from discussions with David AustenSmith, Tim Feddersen, Steve Callander, Marciano Siniscalchi, Sean Gailmard, Jaehoon Kim, Alexandre Debs and all participants in the Voting and Information panel at the Econometric Society Summer Conference at Minnesota, June 2006. Siddarth Madhav has helped a lot with the gures. This is a preliminary draft of this paper and it is possible that there are errors. All responsibility for such errors is mine.
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