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Informative voting and condorcet jury theorems with a continuum of types

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  • Adam Meirowitz

    (Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5015, USA and Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1012, USA)

Abstract

We consider a model of information aggregation in which there are two possible states of the world and agents receive private signals from the set of probability measures over the binary state space - the unit interval. For a reasonably general set of signal densities, a unique symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium in responsive strategies exists and voting is informative in this equilibrium. Asymptotic analysis shows that society makes the correct decision almost surely as population size grows. In contrast to findings of Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) in the finite signal space case and Duggan and Martinelli (1999) in an alternative model in which the signal space is a continuum, this result holds for unanimity rule. The key to the efficiency of unanimity rule is that there are perfectly informative (or at least nearly perfectly informative) signals. A corollary to the asymptotic efficiency result is that for all rules the collective performs better than a single agent's dictatorship for large but finite populations. This need not be true for arbitrary population sizes.

Suggested Citation

  • Adam Meirowitz, 2002. "Informative voting and condorcet jury theorems with a continuum of types," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(1), pages 219-236.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:19:y:2002:i:1:p:219-236
    Note: Received: 10 May 1999/Accepted: 25 September 2000
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Meirowitz, Adam, 2005. "Deliberative Democracy or Market Democracy: Designing Institutions to Aggregate Preferences and Information," Papers 03-28-2005, Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy.
    2. Sourav Bhattacharya, 2013. "Condorcet Jury Theorem in a Spatial Model of Elections," Working Paper 517, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Nov 2013.
    3. Gratton, Gabriele, 2014. "Pandering and electoral competition," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 163-179.
    4. Joseph McMurray, 2008. "Information and Voting: the Wisdom of the Experts versus the Wisdom of the Masses," Wallis Working Papers WP59, University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy.
    5. Youzong Xu, 2019. "Collective decision-making of voters with heterogeneous levels of rationality," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 178(1), pages 267-287, January.
    6. Hummel, Patrick, 2011. "Information aggregation in multicandidate elections under plurality rule and runoff voting," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 1-6, July.
    7. Tsai, Tsung-Sheng, 2009. "The evaluation of majority rules in a legislative bargaining model," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 674-684, December.
    8. Meirowitz, Adam & Pi, Shaoting, 2022. "Voting and trading: The shareholder’s dilemma," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(3), pages 1073-1096.
    9. Mengel, Friederike & Rivas, Javier, 2017. "Common value elections with private information and informative priors: Theory and experiments," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 190-221.
    10. Bozbay, Irem & Peters, Hans, 2019. "Information aggregation with a continuum of types," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 180(C), pages 46-49.
    11. Patrick Hummel, 2012. "Deliberation in large juries with diverse preferences," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 150(3), pages 595-608, March.
    12. Mark Quement & Venuga Yokeeswaran, 2015. "Subgroup deliberation and voting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 45(1), pages 155-186, June.
    13. Morton, Rebecca B. & Tyran, Jean-Robert, 2011. "Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information, abstention, and coordination in standing committees," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 485-509, June.
    14. Meirowitz, Adam, 2004. "In Defense of Exclusionary Deliberation: Communication and Voting with Private Beliefs and Values," Papers 04-06-2004, Princeton University, Research Program in Political Economy.
    15. Sourav Bhattacharya, 2006. "Preference Monotonicity and Information Aggregation in Elections," Working Paper 325, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Dec 2008.
    16. Adam Meirowitz, 2007. "In Defense of Exclusionary Deliberation: Communication and Voting with Private Beliefs and Values," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(3), pages 301-327, July.
    17. Kim, Jaehoon & Fey, Mark, 2007. "The swing voter's curse with adversarial preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 135(1), pages 236-252, July.
    18. J. Goertz, 2014. "Inefficient committees: small elections with three alternatives," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(2), pages 357-375, August.
    19. Alexander Lundberg, 2020. "The importance of expertise in group decisions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 55(3), pages 495-521, October.
    20. Kojima, Fuhito & Takagi, Yuki, 2010. "A theory of hung juries and informative voting," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 69(2), pages 498-502, July.

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