Fair Group Decisions via Non-deterministic Proportional Consensus
100 Pages Posted: 18 Feb 2021 Last revised: 1 Nov 2023
Date Written: May 15, 2022
Abstract
Are there group decision methods which
(i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective decision power even when voters act strategically,
(ii) promote consensus and equality, rather than polarization and inequality, and
(iii) do not favour the status quo or rely too much on chance?
We describe two non-deterministic group decision methods that meet these criteria, one based on automatic bargaining over lotteries, the other on conditional commitments to approve compromise options. Using theoretical analysis, agent-based simulations and a behavioral experiment, we show that these methods prevent majorities from consistently suppressing minorities, as is the case with deterministic methods, and proponents of the status quo from blocking decisions, as in other consensus-based approaches.
Our simulations show that these methods achieve aggregate welfare comparable to common voting methods, while employing chance judiciously, and that the welfare costs of fairness and consensus are small compared to the inequality costs of majoritarianism. In an incentivized experiment with naive participants, we find that a sizable fraction of participants prefers to use a non-deterministic voting method over Plurality Voting to allocate monetary resources. However, this depends critically on their position within the group. Those in the majority show a strong preference for majoritarian voting methods.
The PDF contains the 29 pages long main article plus 71 pages of Supplementary Information.
Keywords: non-majoritarian group decisions, conditional commitments, fairness, strategic voting
JEL Classification: D71, D72, C78, D82
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation