This paper experimentally analyzes the effects if signatories to an international environmental agreement (IEA) apply different voting schemes to determine the terms of the agreement. To this end, unanimity, qualified majority voting, and simple majority voting are compared with respect to the...

Social choice models usually assume that choice is among pre-defined, uni-dimensional and simple objects. Very often, on the contrary, choice is among multifeatured and complex objects: a candidate in an election stands for an electoral programme which is a complex bundle of many interdependent...

We investigate whether the simple plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in a large election with three alternatives. The environment is the same as in the Condorcet Jury Theorem (Condorcet (1785)). Voters have common preferences that depend on the unknown state of nature, and they...

The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By accumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council's voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

Prior research on 'strategic voting' has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

I study necessary and sufficient conditions for a choice function to be rationalised in the following sense: there exists a complete asymmetric relation T (a tournament) such that for each feasible (finite) choice situation, the choice coincides with the uncovered set of T. This notion of...

This paper reports on recurring laboratory elections in which buyers and sellers choose institutional rules to govern a subsequent trading round. The bid auction (buyers propose prices), offer auction (sellers suggest prices) and double auction (both trader types initiate price quotes) make up...