Voting Game Experiments with Incomplete Information : A Survey

This chapter surveys voting game experiments that involve incomplete information with regard to voters’ opinions about what the best course of action might be and characteristics, especially their private costs and benefits related to decision making and their group affiliations (i.e., which candidate or alternative they support). The literature discussed falls mainly into one of two different lines of research, namely experiments conducted within (i) the common value framework developed by Condorcet (1785) to derive his famous jury theorem on information aggregation in groups or (ii) the voter participation game of Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983, 1985). Starting already in the 1970s but then relatively neglected, the number of voting experiments has been growing during the past two decades. The present chapter brings the reader up to date to this second wave of voting experiments with a focus on the Condorcet and participation models, and can be used as a starting point for new directions