Communication and Information in Games of Collective Decision : A Survey of Experimental Results

This paper surveys research of lab experiments on voting games, focusing on six areas that have received much attention in the last few decades: (i) costly voting in elections with two alternatives; (ii) (other) collective action problems; (iii) elections with more than two alternatives; (iv) electoral competition and democratic accountability with imperfect information; (v) information aggregation in committees and juries; and (vi) legislative bargaining. We draw two key lessons from the work reviewed. First, strategic behavior is pervasive in voting games, as opposed to naive or “sincere” behavior. That is, voters do attempt to play best responses to other voters' strategies. Second, social motivations impart an effect on the behavior of players in voting games. Specifically, the welfare of the group of reference induced by the experiment (which may not be the entire “society” participating in the experiment) seems to be an effective motivation in several cases. The paper concludes by identifying some open research questions