Storable Votes with a Pay-as-You-Win Mechanism

Abstract

This paper introduces a new storable vote mechanism (storable votes, pay-as-you-win-mechanism, SV-PAYW) where a fixed number of votes can be cast among different alternatives, and the votes spent (and redistributed) on each election depend only on the number cast for the wining alternative. The mechanism reduces the incentives for strategic voting and allows for minority view integration.A discretized version of the mechanism, is presented and simulated. The implementation ratio, which is a measure that positions the utility from the allocation of electoral victories produced by the mechanism between the random allocation (zero) and the social optimum (one) is high (between 0.7 and 1) when the minority group is larger than 10%; however, for small minorities, the implementation ratio is unstable and often low. In our view, both the qualitative arguments and the simulation results suggest that the SV-PAYW system is a promising new voting mechanism.

Keywords: Voting mechanisms, Storable votes, Vote trading