IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v106y2001i3-4p233-42.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Unanimous Voting Rule Is Not the Political Equivalent to Market Exchange

Author

Listed:
  • Sobel, Russell S
  • Holcombe, Randall G

Abstract

The unanimous voting rule is often viewed as analogous to voluntary market exchange. This paper demonstrates that when third-party pecuniary effects exist, this analogy breaks down because unlike markets, unanimous voting requires compensation for these effects. Thus, efficient market outcomes typically will be rejected by the unanimous voting rule. Even when transactions costs are low enough to make compensation feasible, the political outcome under unanimity will differ from the market outcome. The distributional effects of unanimity provide the incentive for people to substitute rent-seeking behavior for productive activity, and reduce the incentive for productive change, providing additional reasons why a less-than-unanimous voting rule may be optimal when resources are to be allocated politically. Copyright 2001 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Suggested Citation

  • Sobel, Russell S & Holcombe, Randall G, 2001. "The Unanimous Voting Rule Is Not the Political Equivalent to Market Exchange," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 106(3-4), pages 233-242, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:106:y:2001:i:3-4:p:233-42
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Laurent Bouton & Aniol Llorente-Saguer & Frédéric Malherbe, 2014. "Get Rid of Unanimity: The Superiority of Majority Rule with Veto Power," NBER Working Papers 20417, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Laurent Bouto & Aniol Llorente-Saguer & Fédéric Malherbe, 2014. "Get Rid of Unanimity: The Superiority of Majority Rule with Veto Power," Working Papers 722, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    3. Gustafsson, Robin & Autio, Erkko, 2011. "A failure trichotomy in knowledge exploration and exploitation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(6), pages 819-831, July.
    4. Michael Munger & Georg Vanberg, 2023. "Contractarianism, constitutionalism, and the status quo," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 195(3), pages 323-339, June.
    5. A. Georges L. Romme, 2004. "Unanimity Rule and Organizational Decision Making: A Simulation Model," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 15(6), pages 704-718, December.
    6. Zane Spindler & Xavier De Vanssay, 2003. "Constitutional Design for a Rent Seeking Society: The Voting Rule Choice Revisited," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 95-105, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:106:y:2001:i:3-4:p:233-42. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.