In a model of simultaneous voting, Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) consider the possibility that jurors vote strategically, rather than sincerely reflecting their individual information. This results in the counterintuitive result that a jury is more likely to convict the innocent under a...

We analyze a committee decision in which individuals with common preferences are uncertain which of two alternatives is better for them. Members can acquire costly information. Private signals and information choice are both continuous. As is consistent with Down's rational ignorance hypothesis,...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...

We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences - that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

The nonasymptotic Condorcet jury theorem states that, under certain conditions, group decision-making by simple majority voting can decide more efficiently than single-person decision-making, in terms of having a higher probability of choosing the better alternative. Wit (1998) showed that the...

Herein, we prove a Condorcet jury theorem (CJT) for large elections with multiple alternatives. Voters have common interests that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal about the state of nature and then submits one vote (simple plurality rule). We...

In this paper, we classify all maximal peak-pit Condorcet domains of maximal width for n ≤ 5 alternatives. To achieve this, we bring together ideas from several branches of combinatorics. The main tool used in the classification is the ideal of a domain. In contrast to the size of maximal...

We define and examine the concept of social acceptability of committees, in multi-winner elections context. We say that a committee is socially acceptable if each member in this committee is socially acceptable, i.e., the number of voters who rank her in their top half of the candidates is at...

We incorporate prospect-theory preferences in a game-theoretic model to study voter turnout. We show that voter turnout is heavily affected by agents having subjective reference points with respect to the vote or abstain decision and their subjective probability weighting in the decision-making...

We design an experiment to test how voters vote in a small committee election with three alternatives. Voters have common preferences that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal prior to the election and then casts a vote. The alternative with the...

Correct aggregation of individual preferences into collective one is central problem of nowadays Social Choice theory. After the Arrow's and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility theorems it became clear that our desire to justify an electoral procedure is doomed to failure. At the same time a...

We introduce voter uncertainty to the unidimensional spatial model of elections. Strategic voters choose between the status quo and a proposed reform, and there is uncertainty about the location of the reform on the policy space. If each possible location of the reform is on the same side of the...

We say that an alternative is socially acceptable if the number of individuals who rank it among their most preferred half of the alternatives is at least as large as the number of individuals who rank it among the least preferred half. A Condorcet winner may not be socially acceptable. However,...

For committee or multiwinner elections, the Chamberlin-Courant rule (CCR), which combines the Borda rule and the proportional representation, aims to pick the most representative committee (Chamberlin and Courant, 1983). Chamberlin and Courant (1983) have shown that if the size of the committee...

It is shown that fractional voting system (FVS) can be used to circumvent Arrow's paradox. In the FVS, the input to the voting system is the preference distribution of the voters and not the usual preference order. As a consequence, it turns out that it is possible to associate a unique...