Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare ?

Annual Review of Economics, Forthcoming

53 Pages Posted: 13 Oct 2020 Last revised: 18 Dec 2020

See all articles by Alessandra Casella

Alessandra Casella

Columbia University - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Antonin Macé

Paris School of Economics, CNRS and ENS

Date Written: December 17, 2020

Abstract

Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, acquiring
others' votes when preferences are strong in exchange for giving votes away when
preferences are weak. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing?
For a practice long believed to be central to collective decisions, the lack of a clear
answer is surprising. We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its
related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling -- the exchange
of votes for votes. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against
a numeraire. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions -- to trade votes with oneself only. We fi nd that vote trading and vote markets
are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters
to allocate votes across decisions.

Keywords: logrolling, vote trading, storable votes, quadratic voting, bundling, vote markets

JEL Classification: D02, D47, D70, D71,D72, D82, P16

Suggested Citation

Casella, Alessandra and Macé, Antonin, Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare ? (December 17, 2020). Annual Review of Economics, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3680422 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3680422

Alessandra Casella

Columbia University - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics ( email )

420 W. 118th Street
New York, NY 10027
United States
212-854-2459 (Phone)
212-854-8059 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.columbia.edu/~ac186/

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

London
United Kingdom

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Antonin Macé (Contact Author)

Paris School of Economics, CNRS and ENS ( email )

France

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/site/antoninmace/home

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