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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Clinton Gubong Gassi (Université de Franche-Comté, CRESE, UR3190, F-25000 Besançon, France); Frank Steffen (Faculty of Law, Business and Economics, University of Bayreuth, Germany) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to identify the multi-winner voting rules that can be con- sidered as extension of the Plurality rule. Multi-winner voting addresses the problem of selecting a fixed-size subset of candidates, called a committee, from a larger set of available candidates based on the voters’ preferences. In the single-winner setting, where each voter provides a strict ranking of the candidates and the goal is to select a unique candidate, Yeh (2008) characterized the Plurality rule as the only voting rule satisfying five independent axioms: anonymity, neutrality, consistency, efficiency, and top-only. In this paper, we demonstrate that a natural extension of these axioms to the multi-winner framework allows us to identify a class of top-k counting rules as multi-winner analogous to the Plurality rule. |
| Keywords: | Multi-winner, voting rules, axioms, Plurality rule, top-k counting rules. |
| JEL: | D71 D72 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crb:wpaper:2024-18 |
| By: | Martin J. Osborne |
| Abstract: | The members of a finite set of office-motivated politicians choose sequentially whether to become candidates in an electoral competition. Each candidate chooses a position from a set X that is a (possibly strict) subset of the set of all positions. I show that if X is a subset of a one-dimensional interval, a tie is possible only among candidates who choose the same position, and a candidate wins if her vote share exceeds 1/2 and only if it is at least as large as any other candidate's vote share, then in every subgame perfect equilibrium the first and last politicians to move enter at one of the members of X closest to the median of the citizens' favorite positions and the remaining politicians do not enter. The assumption about ties is satisfied if the winner of the election is chosen from among the candidates with the highest vote shares by a mediator with strict preferences over positions or if the set X does not admit ties at distinct positions. |
| Keywords: | Electoral competition, sequential entry |
| JEL: | P0 |
| Date: | 2024–09–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-786 |
| By: | Sinara Gharibyan |
| Abstract: | Is family or collective remembrance of the distant past more powerful in shaping current behavior? To answer this question, I link two historical episodes from Armenian history separated by a century. During both World War I (WWI) and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Russia was anticipated to provide military support to Armenia, its ally, but failed to do so. I demonstrate that the memories of the first Russian betrayal were activated after the second war. I identify family memory of the first betrayal using distinct West Armenian (Ottoman Armenian) surnames and proxy collective memory through locations renamed to commemorate lost Armenian localities during WWI. The difference-in-differences (DiD) approach shows that both family and collective remembrance negatively affect pro-Russian parties’ vote share, with all the conventional assumptions of DiD verified. Family remembrance influences behavior through traumatic recall, whereas collective remembrance operates via social capital. |
| Keywords: | Collective memory, Family remembrance, Voting, Social capital |
| JEL: | D7 J15 N44 Z13 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cer:papers:wp787 |
| By: | Matthew S. Jaremski; David C. Wheelock |
| Abstract: | The Federal Reserve Act was the outcome of compromises among competing economic and political interests. Numerous studies examine how the act came together but largely take the makeup of Congress and the Administration as given rather than considering the unique circumstances that led to that political distribution. This paper examines how the election of 1912 changed the makeup of Congress and increased the likelihood of central banking legislation and shaped the act. The decision of Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressives to run as third-party candidates split the Republican Party and enabled Democrats to capture the White House and Congress. We show that the election produced a less polarized Congress and that newly-elected members were more likely to vote for the act. Absent their interparty split, Republicans would likely have held the White House and Congress, and any legislation to establish a central bank almost certainly would have been quite different. |
| JEL: | G28 N42 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32987 |
| By: | Marco Battaglini; Thomas R. Palfrey |
| Abstract: | We study the volunteer’s dilemma in environments with heterogeneous preferences and private information. We characterize the efficiency properties of equilibrium, which is a departure from all the previous literature that focuses only on the probability of group success. While the probability of success may be non-monotonic in the size of the group, we show that per-capita welfare is always increasing for all types, strictly for sufficiently high types. As group size increases, the expected utility of every type converges to the expected utility of the type with the lowest possible cost, which is the same expected utility when there is no free rider problem, i.e., when there is only a single player in the game and that player has the lowest possible cost. |
| JEL: | C78 D71 D72 H41 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32999 |
| By: | Yurun Ge; Lucas B\"ottcher; Tom Chou; Maria R. D'Orsogna |
| Abstract: | Collective decision-making is the process through which diverse stakeholders reach a joint decision. Within societal settings, one example is participatory budgeting, where constituents decide on the funding of public projects. How to most efficiently aggregate diverse stakeholder inputs on a portfolio of projects with uncertain long-term benefits remains an open question. We address this problem by studying collective decision-making through the integration of preference aggregation and knapsack allocation methods. Since different stakeholder groups may evaluate projects differently, we examine several aggregation methods that combine their diverse inputs. The aggregated evaluations are then used to fill a ``collective'' knapsack. Among the methods we consider are the arithmetic mean, Borda-type rankings, and delegation to experts. We find that the factors improving an aggregation method's ability to identify projects with the greatest expected long-term value include having many stakeholder groups, moderate variation in their expertise levels, and some degree of delegation or bias favoring groups better positioned to objectively assess the projects. We also discuss how evaluation errors and heterogeneous costs impact project selection. Our proposed aggregation methods are relevant not only in the context of funding public projects but also, more generally, for organizational decision-making under uncertainty. |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2409.13236 |
| By: | Bhattacharjee, Arnab; Holly, Sean; Wasseja, Mustapha |
| Abstract: | Transcripts from the US Federal Open Markets Committee provide, albeit with a lag, valuable information on the monetary policymaking process at the Federal Reserve Bank. We use the data compiled by Chappell et al. (2005b) on preferred interest rates (not votes) of individual FOMC members. Together with information on which monetary policy decisions are based, we use these preferred rates to understand decision making in the FOMC, focussing both on cross-member heterogeneity and interaction among the members of the committee. Our contribution is to provide a method of unearthing otherwise unobservable interactions between the members of the FOMC. We find substantial heterogeneity in the policy reaction function across members. Further, we identify significant interactions between individuals on the committee. The nature of these interdependencies tell us something about information sharing and strategic interactions within the FOMC and provide interesting comparisons with the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. |
| Keywords: | Monetary policy, Interest rates, FOMC decision making, Spatial Weights Matrix, Spatial Lag Model |
| JEL: | E42 E43 E50 E58 C31 C34 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:hwuaef:303042 |