The swing voter's curse revisited: Transparency's impact on committee voting

Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Moumita Deb, Johannes Lohse and Rebecca McDonald
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Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay: University of Birmingham
Moumita Deb: University of Heidelberg
Rebecca McDonald: University of Birmingham

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: Majority voting is considered an efficient information aggregation mechanism in committee decision-making. We examine if this holds in environments where voters first need to acquire information from sources of varied quality and cost. In such environments, efficiency may depend on free-riding incentives and the 'transparency' regime - the knowledge voters have about other voters' acquired information. Intuitively, more transparent regimes should improve efficiency. Our theoretical model instead demonstrates that under some conditions, less transparent regimes can match the rate of efficient information aggregation in more transparent regimes if all members cast a vote based on the information they hold. However, a Pareto inferior swing voter's curse (SVC) equilibrium arises in less transparent regimes if less informed members abstain. We test this proposition in a lab experiment, randomly assigning participants to different transparency regimes. Results in less transparent regimes are consistent with the SVC equilibrium, leading to less favourable outcomes than in more transparent regimes. We thus offer the first experimental evidence on the effects of different transparency regimes on information acquisition, voting, and overall efficiency

Keywords: Information acquisition; Voting; Transparency; Swing voter's curse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D71 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
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https://repec.cal.bham.ac.uk/pdf/24-01.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: The Swing Voter’s Curse Revisited: Transparency’s Impact on Committee Voting (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:24-01

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