Agenda control as a cheap talk game: Theory and experiments with Storable Votes

Agenda Control and Reciprocity in Sequential Voting Decisions

“…Earlier work has shown that reciprocity plays a minor role if information about preferences is private (see Casella ). Our findings highlight that reciprocity matters for agenda manipulation if preferences are common knowledge, and even more so, if voting behavior is observable.…”

“…We provide evidence in which decision environments reciprocity is likely to generate additional possibilities for agenda manipulation and study whether committee chairs are willing and able to exploit such opportunities. As we focus on sequential voting on a series of binary proposals, our study relates closely to the work by Casella (). She studies sequential voting on a known series of binary proposals in a secret ballot.…”

6. Experiments in Political Economy

“…the use of sincere computerized voters and inexperienced human voters, as well as substance, e.g., how voters formulate their voting strategies in an agenda under conditions of complete information. Regarding the latter, there are many …ndings from bargaining games 39 and other multistage games 40 where players have to make multiple sequential decisions and do not follow backward induction solutions. This is even true in cases where the backward induction solution is e¢ cient and perfectly equitable (Fey et al 2000), although with repetition there is convergence in the direction of the backward induction solution.…”

“…On average, each subject practices the task approximately 5 times, and they …nd no correlation between the number of practices by a subject and their tendency to vote sophisticatedly. 39 See Roth (1996) for a discussion of several of these studies. 40 See, for example, the centipede game study by McKelvey and Palfrey (1992) and subsequent studies of that game.…”

Mechanisms for Efficient Voting with Private Information about Preferences

“…Casella et al (2008Casella et al ( , 2010 show theoretically, as well as in laboratory and field experiments, that the storable votes mechanism is well suited to protect minorities in an efficient way. Furthermore, Casella (2011) demonstrates that storable votes maintain their desirable properties also with endogenous agenda setting. Hortala-Vallve (2010) generalises the storable votes mechanism to Ôqualitative votingÕ, which allows players to freely allocate votes across decisions.…”