It is widely believed that politicians allocate public resources in ways to maximize political gains. But what is less clear is whether this comes at a cost to welfare; and if so, whether alternative electoral rules can help reduce these costs. In this paper, we address both of these questions by...

Models of political competition portray political candidates as seeking the support of the median voter to win elections by majority voting. In practice, political candidates seek supermajorities rather than majorities based on support of the median voter. We study the political benefits from...

We propose a theory-based experimental approach to compare the properties of approval voting (AV) with those of plurality. This comparison is motivated by the theoretical predictions that, in our aggregate uncertainty setup, AV should produce close to first-best outcomes, while plurality will...

The rational-voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions (the paradox of voting and Duverger's Law) are at odds with reality. Recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an (arguably unrealistic)...

This thesis consists of three independent contributions in the area of microeconomic theory. All three contributions share the feature of agents holding multidimensional private information which motivates the title of the thesis. Part 1, entitled “Consistency and Communication in...

We distinguish between (i) voting systems in which voters can rank candidates and (ii) those in which they can grade candidates, such as approval voting, in which voters can give two grades—approve (1) or not approve (0)—to candidates. While two grades rule out a discrepancy between the...

We propose a theory-based experimental approach to compare the properties of approval voting (AV) with those of plurality. This comparison is motivated by the theoretical predictions that, in our aggregate uncertainty setup, AV should produce close to first-best outcomes, while plurality will...

Given a large enough population of voters whose utility functions satisfy certain statistical regularities, we show that voting rules such as the Borda rule, approval voting, and evaluative voting have a very high probability of selecting the social alternative which maximizes the utilitarian...

The paper considers two-person bargaining under Approval Voting. It first proves the existence of pure strategy equilibria. Then it shows that this bargaining method ensures that both players obtain at least their average and median utility level in equilibrium. Finally it proves that, provided...

This paper aims at presenting a new voting function which is obtained in Balinski-Laraki's framework and benefits mean and median advantages. The so-called Mean-Median Comprise Method (MMCM) has fulfilled criteria such as unanimity, neutrality, anonymity, monotonicity, and Arrow's independence...

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...

This paper attacks a problem like the one addressed in an earlier work (Potthoff, 2013) but is more mathematical. The setting is one where an election is to choose a single winner from m ( 2) candidates, it is postulated that voters have knowledge of the preference profile of the electorate, and...

Under evaluative voting, the voter freely grades each candidate on a numerical scale, with the winning candidate being determined by the sum of the grades they receive. This paper compares evaluative voting with the two-round system, reporting on an experiment, conducted during the 2012 French...

This paper attacks a problem like the one addressed in an earlier work (Potthoff, 2013) but is more mathematical. The setting is one where an election is to choose a single winner from <i>m</i> ( 2) candidates, it is postulated that voters have knowledge of the preference profile of the electorate, and...