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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Le Barbanchon, Thomas; Sauvagnat, Julien |
| Abstract: | We study and quantify the implications of voter bias and electoral competition for the gender composition of politicians. We show that unfavorable voters' attitudes towards women and local gender earnings gaps correlate negatively with the share of female candidates in both French Parliamentary elections, and across countries. Using within-candidate variation only, we also find that female candidates in French elections obtain lower vote shares in municipalities with higher gender earnings gaps. We then propose a model of political selection with voter bias. We show theoretically that when voters are biased against women, political parties facing gender quotas tend to select male candidates in the most contestable districts. We take this test to the data using the introduction of gender quotas in France, and find strong support for the existence of a voter bias in favor of male candidates. Finally, we calibrate our model and confirm in simulations that electoral competition significantly hinders the effectiveness of gender quotas in boosting women's presence in politics. |
| Keywords: | Electoral Competition; gender attitudes; Gender Quotas; women in politics |
| JEL: | D72 D78 J16 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13238&r=cdm |
| By: | Jeannette Brosig-Koch; Timo Heinrich; Heike Hennig-Schmidt; Claudia Keser; Joachim Weimann |
| Abstract: | Since Mancur Olson's "Logic of collective action" it is common conviction in social sciences that in large groups the prospects of a successful organization of collective actions are rather bad. Following Olson’s logic, the impact of an individual’s costly contribution becomes smaller if the group gets larger and, consequently, the incentive to cooperate decreases with group size. Conducting a series of laboratory experiments with large groups of up to 100 subjects, we demonstrate that Olson's logic does not generally account for observed behavior. Large groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is almost negligible are still able to provide a public good in the same way as small groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is much higher. Nevertheless, we find that small variations of the MPCR in large groups have a strong effect on contributions. We develop a hypothesis concerning the interplay of MPCR and group size, which is based on the assumption that the salience of the advantages of mutual cooperation plays a decisive role. This hypothesis is successfully tested in a second series of experiments. Our result raises hopes that the chance to organize collective action of large groups is much higher than expected so far. Since Mancur Olson's "Logic of collective action" it is common conviction in social sciences that in large groups the prospects of a successful organization of collective actions are rather bad. Following Olson’s logic, the impact of an individual’s costly contribution becomes smaller if the group gets larger and, consequently, the incentive to cooperate decreases with group size. Conducting a series of laboratory experiments with large groups of up to 100 subjects, we demonstrate that Olson's logic does not generally account for observed behavior. Large groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is almost negligible are still able to provide a public good in the same way as small groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is much higher. Nevertheless, we find that small variations of the MPCR in large groups have a strong effect on contributions. We develop a hypothesis concerning the interplay of MPCR and group size, which is based on the assumption that the salience of the advantages of mutual cooperation plays a decisive role. This hypothesis is successfully tested in a second series of experiments. Our result raises hopes that the chance to organize collective action of large groups is much higher than expected so far. |
| Date: | 2018–03–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cir:cirwor:2018s-02&r=cdm |
| By: | Born, Andreas (Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics); Ranehill, Eva (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University); Sandberg, Anna (Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University) |
| Abstract: | Despite the significant growth in female labor force participation and educational attainment over the past decades, few women reach leadership positions. In this study, we explore whether male dominated environments, in and of themselves, adversely affect women´s willingness to lead a team. We find that women randomly assigned to male majority teams are less willing to become team leaders than women assigned to female majority teams. Analyses of potential mechanisms show that women in male majority teams are less confident in their relative performance, less influential, and more swayed by others in team discussions. They also (accurately) believe that they will receive less support from team members in a leadership election. Taken together, our results indicate that the absence of women in male dominated contexts may be a self-reinforcing process. |
| Keywords: | leadership; gender differences; experiment |
| JEL: | C92 J16 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0744&r=cdm |
| By: | De Benedetto, Marco Alberto |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of the electoral system on the quality of politicians, measured by the average educational attainment, at the local level in Italy over the period 1994-2017. Since 1993, municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants vote with a single-ballot system, whereas cities above 15,000 inhabitants threshold are subject to a double ballot. Exploiting the discontinuous policy change nearby the population cut-off we have implemented a RDD and found that runoff elections lead to a decrease in the educational attainment of local politicians by about 2% compared to years of schooling of politicians in municipalities voting with a single-ballot scheme. We speculate that the negative effect is driven by the different selection process of candidates adopted by political parties between runoff and single-ballot system. Findings are similar when we use alternative measures of quality of politicians related both to the previous occupation and to previous political experience, and when we control for different measures of political closeness. |
| Keywords: | Regression discontinuity design; Electoral system; Education; Political competition. |
| JEL: | C31 D72 I20 J42 |
| Date: | 2018–10–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:89511&r=cdm |
| By: | Cipullo, Davide (Department of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper compares the runoff system and the plurality rule in terms of the size and composition of public expenditures. I use the change in the voting rule in Italian municipalities at 15,000 residents to implement a regression discontinuity design. The results show that municipalities under the runoff system spend at least 20 percent more than those under the plurality rule, and that this effect is primarily driven by a large increase in administrative spending. Additionally, the greater number of candidates and the larger coalitions indicate lower accountability under the runoff system than under the plurality rule. |
| Keywords: | Voting rules; Fiscal policy; Runoff; Plurality; Regression discontinuity design |
| JEL: | D72 E02 H39 H50 |
| Date: | 2018–10–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2018_013&r=cdm |
| By: | Mostapha Diss (GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique - ENS Lyon - École normale supérieure - Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet [Saint-Étienne] - Université de Lyon - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Eric Kamwa (LC2S - Laboratoire caribéen de sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UA - Université des Antilles); Abdelmonaim Tlidi (UCA - Université Cadi Ayyad [Marrakech, Maroc]) |
| Abstract: | For three-candidate elections, we compute under the Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption, the conditional probabilities of the Absolute Majority Winner Paradox (AMWP) and the Absolute Majority Loser Paradox (AMLP) under the Plurality rule, the Borda rule, and the Negative Plurality rule for a given number of voters. We also provide a representation of the conditional probability of these paradoxes for the whole family of weighted scoring rules with large electorates. The AMWP occurs when a candidate who is ranked first by more than half of the voters is not selected by a given voting rule; the AMLP appears when a candidate who is ranked last by more than half of the voters is elected. As no research papers have tried to evaluate the likelihood of these paradoxes, this note is designed to fill this void. Our results allow us to claim that ignoring these two paradoxes in the literature, particularly AMWP, is not justified. |
| Date: | 2018–10–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01896273&r=cdm |
| By: | Dreher, Axel; Lang, Valentin; Rosendorff, B. Peter; Vreeland, James Raymond |
| Abstract: | We show how major shareholders can exploit their power over international organizations to hide their foreign-policy interventions from domestic audiences. We argue that major powers exert influence bilaterally when domestic audiences view the intervention favorably. When domestic audiences are more skeptical of a target country, favors are granted via international organizations. We test this theory empirically by examining how the United States uses bilateral aid and IMF loans to buy other countries' votes in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Introducing new data on voting behavior in the UNSC over the 1960-2015 period, our results show that states allied with the US receive more bilateral aid when voting in line with the United States in the UNSC, while concurring votes of states less allied with the US are rewarded with loans from the IMF. Temporary UNSC members that vote against the United States do not receive such perks. |
| Keywords: | Aid; IMF; United Nations Security Council; voting; World Bank |
| JEL: | F35 O11 O19 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13290&r=cdm |
| By: | Daniel Montolio (Department of Economics, University of Barcelona and Barcelona Institute of Economics.); Ana Tur-Prats (Department of Economics, University of California, Merced.) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the historical determinants and long-term persistence of social capital, as well as its effect on economic development, by looking at the legacy of the commons in a Spanish region. In medieval times, common goods were granted to townships and were managed collectively by local citizens. This enabled the establishment of institutions for collective action and self-government. Common goods persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that the experience of cooperation among villagers, repeated over the centuries, increased the social capital in each local community. In 1845, a law forced small villages to merge with others, a fact which generated exogenous variation in the number of mergers (i.e., cooperative networks) that each modern municipality was required to have. We exploit this change in an IV and RD setting and find that current municipalities formed by a greater number of old townships have a denser network of associations. We also find that higher social capital is associated with more economic development. |
| Keywords: | collective action, self-government, long-term persistence, common goods |
| JEL: | N90 P48 Z10 H49 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xrp:wpaper:xreap2018-8&r=cdm |
| By: | S. Nageeb Ali (Department of Economics, Penn State University); Aislinn Bohren (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania) |
| Abstract: | A Principal appoints a committee of partially informed experts to choose a policy. The experts' preferences are aligned with each other but conflict with hers. We study whether she gains from banning committee members from communicating or "deliberating" before voting. Our main result is that if the committee plays its preferred equilibrium and the Principal must use a threshold voting rule, then she does not gain from banning deliberation. We show using examples how she can gain if she can choose the equilibrium played by the committee, or use a non-anonymous or non-monotone social choice rule. |
| Keywords: | Information Aggregation, Committees, Deliberation, Collusion |
| JEL: | D7 D8 |
| Date: | 2018–09–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:18-022&r=cdm |
| By: | Garance Genicot ⓡ; Laurent Bouton ⓡ; Micael Castanheira ⓡ |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the political determinants of inequality in government interventions under the majoritarian and proportional representation systems. Using a model of electoral competition with targetable government intervention and heterogeneous localities, we uncover a novel relative electoral sensitivity effect in majoritarian systems. This effect, which depends on the geographic distribution of voters, can incentivize parties to allocate resources more equally under majoritarian systems than proportional representation systems. This contrasts with the conventional wisdom that government interventions are more unequal in majoritarian systems. |
| JEL: | D72 H00 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:25205&r=cdm |
| By: | Aislinn Bohren (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania); Daniel Hauser (Department of Economics, Aalto University) |
| Abstract: | We explore how model misspecification affects long-run learning in a sequential social learning setting. Individuals learn from diverse sources, including private signals, public signals and the actions and outcomes of others. An agent's type specifies her model of the world. Misspecified types have incorrect beliefs about the signal distribution, how other agents draw inference and/or others' preferences. Our main result is a simple criterion to characterize long-run learning outcomes that is straightforward to derive from the primitives of the misspecification. Depending on the nature of the misspecification, we show that learning may be correct, incorrect or beliefs may not converge. Multiple degenerate limit beliefs may arise and agents may asymptotically disagree, despite observing the same sequence of information. We also establish that the correctly specified model is robust - agents with approximately correct models almost surely learn the true state. We close with a demonstration of how our framework can capture three broad categories of model misspecification: strategic misspecification, such as level-k and cognitive hierarchy, signal misspecification, such as partisan bias, and preference misspecification from social perception biases, such as the false consensus effect and pluralistic ignorance. For each case, we illustrate how to calculate the set of asymptotic learning outcomes and derive comparative statics for how this set changes with the parameters of the misspecification. |
| Keywords: | Social learning, model misspecification, bounded rationality |
| Date: | 2018–07–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pen:papers:18-017&r=cdm |
| By: | Laurent Bartholdi; Wade Hann-Caruthers; Maya Josyula; Omer Tamuz; Leeat Yariv |
| Abstract: | A celebrated result in social choice is May's Theorem, providing the foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a modification of May's symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set of rules that still treat voters equally, but have minimal winning coalitions comprising a vanishing fraction of the population. We conclude that procedural fairness can coexist with the empowerment of a small minority of individuals. Methodologically, we introduce techniques from discrete mathematics and illustrate their usefulness for the analysis of social choice questions. |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1811.01227&r=cdm |
| By: | Moldovanu, Benny |
| Abstract: | We study killer amendments under various informational regimes and postulated voter behavior. In particular, the success chances of killer amendments are shown to differ across several well-known binary, sequential voting procedures. In light of this theory, we describe a remarkable instance of a motion-proposing and agenda-setting strategy by the Nazi party, NSDAP, during the Weimar Republic. Their purpose was to kill a motion of toleration of the new 1928 Government, and they were supported by their fiercest enemies on the far left, the communist party. The combined killer strategy was bound to be successful, but it ultimately failed because of another agenda-setting counter-move undertaken by the Reichstag president. |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13260&r=cdm |
| By: | Petros G. Sekeris; Dimitrios Xefteris |
| Abstract: | In strategic environments, a principal may increase her payoffs when she delegates decisions to an agent with exogenously or endogenously (e.g. via a contract) diverse preferences. We show that a principal can also increase her payoffs by delegating decisions to an organization of agents -i.e. to a group of rational individuals who interact according to a specified set of rules- even when the agents' preferences are identical to those of the principal. Arguably, this provides novel intuition regarding the contemporary structure of firms in several oligopolistic markets, where decision making is decentralized and the interests of agents and firm owners are, broadly speaking, aligned. |
| Keywords: | delegation; organizations; decentralization; efficiency |
| JEL: | D71 D72 |
| Date: | 2018–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucy:cypeua:15-2018&r=cdm |
| By: | Rigos, Alexandros (Department of Economics, Lund University) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how large populations of rationally inattentive individuals acquire and use information about economic fundamentals when, along with the motive to accurately estimate the fundamental, they are driven by coordination motives. Information acquisition is costly but flexible: players design their information channel by determining the distribution of the signal that they receive and arbitrarily correlating it with the fundamental. Costs are linear in the reduction of Shannon entropy. Firstly, the classes of equilibria in which players use continuous strategies and equilibria without information acquisition are characterized. This is achieved without assuming a normal prior for the fundamental. Secondly, equilibria where the population-wide average action is an affine function of the fundamental exist only when the fundamental is normally distributed. This indicates that equilibrium tractability heavily depends on the normality assumption prevalent in existing literature. Finally, multiple equilibria occur under some parameter regions with high coordination motiv |
| Keywords: | Coordination games; Beauty-contest; Flexible information acquisition; Rational inattention; Non-normal prior |
| JEL: | C72 D83 |
| Date: | 2018–11–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2018_030&r=cdm |
| By: | Banuri, Sheheryar; Dercon, Stefan; Gauri, Varun |
| Abstract: | Although the decisions of policy professionals are often more consequential than those of individuals in their private capacity, there is a dearth of studies on the biases of policy professionals: those who prepare and implement policy on behalf of elected politicians. Experiments conducted on a novel subject pool of development policy professionals (public servants of the World Bank and the Department for International Development in the UK) show that policy professionals are indeed subject to decision making traps, including the effects of framing outcomes as losses or gains, and most strikingly, confirmation bias driven by ideological predisposition, despite having an explicit mission to promote evidence-informed and impartial decision making. These findings should worry policy professionals and their principals in governments and large organizations, as well as citizens themselves. A further experiment, in which policy professionals engage in discussion, shows that deliberation may be able to mitigate the effects of some of these biases. |
| Keywords: | behavioural economics; bureaucracy; evidence-based policy making |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13289&r=cdm |
| By: | Maximilian Goethner (FSU Jena); Sebastian Luettig (FSU Jena); Tobias Regner (FSU Jena) |
| Abstract: | Crowdinvesting emerged recently as an alternative way of funding for start-up projects. Our dataset consists of all pledges made at Companisto, one of the largest crowdinvesting platforms in Europe. Using cluster analysis based on individual investment histories, we find that crowdinvestors differ in their investment strategies and motivations. We can distinguish three types of crowdinvestors that vary in their response to project quality signals of entrepreneurs, project-related information reducing the degree of uncertainty and social influence by fellow investors: Casual Investors, Crowd Enthusiasts, and Sophisticated Investors. We conclude that crowdinvestors are anything but a homogeneous group. Instead, they are motivated by different factors and respond to different signals when making investment decisions. |
| Keywords: | Crowdinvesting, Entrepreneurial finance, New ventures, Cluster analysis, Social influence, Signaling |
| JEL: | G23 L26 |
| Date: | 2018–11–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2018-018&r=cdm |