Semi-Flexible Majority Rules for Public Good Provision
CER-ETH – Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich Working Paper No. 17/272
29 Pages Posted: 16 Jun 2017
There are 2 versions of this paper
Semi-Flexible Majority Rules for Public Good Provision
Semi-Flexible Majority Rules for Public Good Provision
Date Written: June 15, 2017
Abstract
We introduce a two-stage, multiple-round voting procedure where the thresholds needed for approval require a qualified majority and vary with the proposal on the table. We apply such a procedure to instances of public-good provision where the citizens’ valuations can take two values and are private. We show that the procedure elicits and aggregates the information about the valuations and implements the utilitarian optimal public good level. This level is chosen after all potential socially optimal policies have been considered. We also develop a compound procedure to ensure utilitarian optimality when there are arbitrarily finitely many types of citizen.
Keywords: Voting; Utilitarianism; Implementation
JEL Classification: C72; D70
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation