Group Cascades in Strategic Voting

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See all articles by James Stark

James Stark

The University of Sydney - School of Economics

Jiemai Wu

The University of Sydney - School of Economics

Haozheng Chen

The University of Sydney - School of Economics

Date Written: January 30, 2025

Abstract

We bridge the theories of information cascades (Bikhchandani et al., 1992) and strategic voting (Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1998) by studying a sequence of voting groups whose members have common values and independent private information. Each group strategically votes on a decision after observing all earlier groups' decisions. We show that the asymptotic public belief distributions and expected utilities are sensitive to the voting rules. When all groups use the same voting rule, the rule that maximises asymptotic payoff can differ from the one that maximises the first group's information revelation. This difference occurs only when the former rule induces limit beliefs strictly above the threshold that triggers cascades, which is always true for the unanimous rule but not the relatively symmetric rules. We present examples where, under a weak prior belief, the simple majority rule is best for the first group but asymptotically dominated by the unanimous rule.

Keywords: Information cascades, observational learning, strategic voting, common value voting

Suggested Citation

Stark, James and Wu, Jiemai and Chen, Haozheng, Group Cascades in Strategic Voting (January 30, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

James Stark

The University of Sydney - School of Economics ( email )

Jiemai Wu (Contact Author)

The University of Sydney - School of Economics ( email )

Social Sciences Building
Room 510
Sydney, NSW 2006
Australia

Haozheng Chen

The University of Sydney - School of Economics ( email )

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