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Abortions, Brexit and Trees

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  • moldovanu, benny
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Abstract

We study how parliaments and other committees vote to select one out of several alternatives in situations where not all available options can be ordered along a \left-right" axis. Practically all democratic parliaments routinely use Sequential Binary Voting Procedures in or- der to select one of several alternatives. Which agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed ? We assume that pref- erences are single-peaked on an arbitrary tree and we study convex agendas where, at each stage in the sequential, binary voting process, the tree of remaining alternatives is divided in two subtrees that are subjected to a binary Yes-No vote. In this wide class of situations we show that dynamic, strategic voting is congruent with sincere, unsophisticated voting even if agents are privately informed, and no matter what their beliefs about other voters are. We conclude the paper by illustrating the empirical implications of our results for two large case studies from Germany and from the UK.

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  • moldovanu, benny & ,, 2019. "Abortions, Brexit and Trees," CEPR Discussion Papers 14183, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14183
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Richard Zeckhauser, 1969. "Majority Rule with Lotteries on Alternatives," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 83(4), pages 696-703.
    2. Andreas Kleiner & Benny Moldovanu, 2020. "The failure of a Nazi “killer” amendment," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 183(1), pages 133-149, April.
    3. Demange, Gabrielle, 1982. "Single-peaked orders on a tree," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 389-396, December.
    4. Moulin, Herve, 1979. "Dominance Solvable Voting Schemes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(6), pages 1137-1151, November.
    5. Alex Gershkov & Andreas Kleiner & Benny Moldovanu & Xianwen Shi, 2019. "The Art of Compromising: Voting with Interdependent Values and the Flag of the Weimar Republic," Working Papers tecipa-645, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    6. Trick, Michael A., 1989. "Recognizing single-peaked preferences on a tree," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 329-334, June.
    7. McKelvey, Richard D. & Niemi, Richard G., 1978. "A multistage game representation of sophisticated voting for binary procedures," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 1-22, June.
    8. Andreas Kleiner & Benny Moldovanu, 2017. "Content-Based Agendas and Qualified Majorities in Sequential Voting," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(6), pages 1477-1506, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Mackenzie, Andrew & Zhou, Yu, 2022. "Menu mechanisms," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 204(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voting; Agenda; Revealed preference;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

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