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Optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition

Alex Gershkov, +1 more
- 01 Jan 2009 - 
- Vol. 144, Iss: 1, pp 36-68
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TLDR
It is shown that, of all mechanisms, a sequential one is optimal and works as follows: one agent at a time is selected to acquire information and report the resulting signal and the restriction to ex-post efficiency is shown to be without loss when the available signals are sufficiently imprecise.
About: 
This article is published in Journal of Economic Theory.The article was published on 2009-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 96 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Optimal decision.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Delay and Deadlines: Freeriding and Information Revelation in Partnerships †

Arthur Campbell, +2 more
- 28 Apr 2014 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study two sources of delay in teams: freeriding and lack of communication, and find that the optimal deadline maximizes productive efforts while avoiding unnecessary delays.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Voters' Curses: Why We Need Goldilocks Voters

Carlo Prato, +1 more
- 01 Jul 2016 - 
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a formal theory of elections where successful communication of campaign messages requires both effort by candidates and attention from voters, and uncover a curse of the interested voter, by which the same happens when voters have a strong interest in politics.
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Experts, Activists, and Interdependent Citizens: Are Electorates Self-Educating?

T. K. Ahn, +2 more
TL;DR: Ahn et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the imperatives of interdependence, communication, and calculation in political communication networks and discuss the role of expertise and bias in political communications networks.
Journal ArticleDOI

Information Acquisition and the Exclusion of Evidence in Trials

Benjamin Lester, +2 more
- 01 Apr 2012 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, a formal model is provided that rationalizes the principle of probative evidence exclusion in common law systems, where the judge excludes evidence in order to incentivize the jury to focus on other, more probative information.
Journal ArticleDOI

Proxy Advisory Firms: The Economics of Selling Information to Voters

Andrey Malenko, +1 more
- 01 Oct 2019 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze how proxy advisors, which sell voting recommendations to shareholders, affect corporate decision-making and evaluate several proposals on regulating proxy advisors and show that some suggested policies, such as reducing proxy advisors' market power or decreasing litigation pressure, can have negative effects.
References
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Book

Optimal Statistical Decisions

Morris H. DeGroot
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a survey of probability theory in the context of sample spaces and decision problems, including the following: 1.1 Experiments and Sample Spaces, and Probability 2.2.3 Random Variables, Random Vectors and Distributions Functions.
Journal ArticleDOI

Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem

David Austen-Smith, +1 more
- 01 Jan 1996 - 
TL;DR: The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the "better" of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI

Optimal coordination mechanisms in generalized principal–agent problems

Roger B. Myerson
- 01 Jun 1982 - 
TL;DR: In this article, the principal can restrict himself to incentive-compatible direct coordination mechanisms, in which agents report their information to the principal, who then recommends to them decisions forming a correlated equilibrium.
Journal ArticleDOI

Full extraction of the surplus in bayesian and dominant strategy auctions

Jacques Cremer, +1 more
- 01 Nov 1988 - 
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider auctions for a single indivisible object, in which the bidders have information about each other which is not available to the seller and show that the seller can use this information to his own benefit, and completely characterize the environ- ments in which a well chosen auction gives him the same expected payoff as that obtainable were he able to sell the object with full information about the bidder's willingness to pay.
Posted Content

The Swing Voter's Curse

Timothy J. Feddersen, +1 more
- 01 Jun 1996 - 
TL;DR: In this article, the existence of a swing voter's curse is demonstrated: less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless, and the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another.
Related Papers (5)

Committee Design with Endogenous Information

Nicola Persico
- 01 Jan 2004 - 

Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem

David Austen-Smith, +1 more
- 01 Jan 1996 - 

The Swing Voter's Curse

Timothy J. Feddersen, +1 more
- 01 Jun 1996 - 

Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting

Timothy J. Feddersen, +1 more
- 01 Mar 1998 - 

Strategic information transmission

Vincent P. Crawford, +1 more
- 01 Nov 1982 - 
Frequently Asked Questions (5)
Q1. What are the contributions in "Optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition∗" ?

This paper analyzes a voting model where ( i ) there is no conflict of interest among the voters, and ( ii ) information acquisition is costly and unobservable. The social planner asks, at random, one voter at a time to invest in information and to report the resulting signal. Voters are informed of neither their position in the sequence nor the reports of previous voters. Obeying the planner by investing and reporting truthfully is optimal for voters. In this scheme, the social planner stops aggregating information and makes a decision when the precision of his posterior exceeds a cut-off which decreases with each additional report. 

The authors also show that, if the cost of information acquisition is small, then, surprisingly, the ex-ante optimal mechanism is often ex-post inefficient. 

It will be shown that if the cost of information acquisition is small enough, then the optimal ex-post efficient mechanism can be improved upon by replacing a continuation mechanism with an ex-post inefficient continuation mechanism. 

Since the SP orders the voters independently of the realizations of the signals,p (A ∩B) = p (s) 2i+ d N ,where (2i+ d) /N is the probability that the deviator is asked to report a signal if a decision is made after a sequence with length 2i+d. 

The authors argue that for given p and c, there always exists a k0 ∈ N such that the mechanism is not incentive compatible if the SP stops asking voters only if |d| ≥ k0.