In 1876, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proposed a committee election procedure that chooses the Condorcet winner when one exists and otherwise eliminates candidates outside the Smith set, then allows for re-votes until a Condorcet winner emerges. The present paper discusses Dodgson’s work in the context of strategic election behavior and suggests a “Dodgson-Hare” method, a variation on Dodgson’s procedure, for use in public elections. This method allows for candidate withdrawal and employs Hare’s plurality-loser-elimination method to resolve persistent cycles. Given plausible assumptions about how candidates decide whether to withdraw when there is a cycle, Dodgson-Hare outperforms Hare, Condorcet-Hare, and 12 other voting rules in a series of spatial-model simulations that count how often each rule is vulnerable to coalitional manipulation. In the case of a one-dimensional spatial model, all coalitional voting strategies that are possible under Condorcet-Hare can be undone in Dodgson-Hare, by the withdrawal of candidates who have incentive to withdraw.
JEL Classifications: D71, D72
This article models interjurisdictional competition over nonlinear taxes on the incomes of mobile individuals. Each individual has exogenous wealth and a location preference that is drawn from a continuous distribution. We find that more concave utility of consumption functions lead to more progressive tax structures, as richer people place less value on marginal consumption relative to location. In the benchmark model, a relative risk aversion coefficient of one is the boundary between progressivity and regressivity. The exercise helps us to understand which types of jurisdictions are more likely to have progressive taxes as their optimal policies.
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