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On the veil-of-ignorance principle : welfare-optimal information disclosure in Voting

Author

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  • Karine van der Straeten

    (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Takuro Yamashita

    (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

Voters' voting decisions crucially depend on their information. Thus, it is an important question how much / what kind of information they should know, as a normative guidance of the optimal extent of transparency. We consider a simple two-alternative majority voting environment, and study the optimal information disclosure policy by a utilitarian social planner. Although full transparency is sometimes (informally) argued as ideal, we show that full transparency is often strictly suboptimal. This is related to the well-known potential mis-match between what a majority wants and what is socially optimal. Under certain conditions, in order to alleviate this mismatch, the op-timal policy discloses just the "anonymized" information about the value of the alternatives to the voters, placing them effectively behind a partial "veil of ignorance".

Suggested Citation

  • Karine van der Straeten & Takuro Yamashita, 2024. "On the veil-of-ignorance principle : welfare-optimal information disclosure in Voting," Working Papers hal-04841216, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04841216
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04841216v1
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