Vote or Shout

We examine an environment with n voters each with a private value over two alternatives. We compare the social surplus of two mechanisms for deciding between them: majority voting and shouting. In majority voting, the choice with the most votes wins. With shouting, the voter who shouts the loudest (sends the costliest wasteful signal) chooses the outcome. We find that it is optimal to use voting in the case where n is large and value for each particular alternative of the voters is bounded. For other cases, the superior mechanism depends upon the order statistics of the distribution of values.