An experimental study of storable votes

Abstract

The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature-the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences-but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance.

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

“…The experiment was designed to evaluate how well storable votes do in the laboratory when the order of the agenda is controlled by a chair, even with inexperienced subjects who may be prone to errors. Previous experiments with storable votes found the voting mechanism remarkably robust to strategic errors: the theoretical welfare properties matched the experimental data very well, even when the subjects' actions deviated systematically from equilibrium strategies (Casella et al, 2006. Evaluating the welfare implications of strategic mistakes is very difficult in theory, not least because the mistakes themselves are difficult to predict.…”

“…First proposed in Casella (2005) and studied experimentally in Casella et al (2006Casella et al ( , 2008, storable votes resemble Cumulative Voting, a voting system used in US corporate boards and local jurisdictions and allowing voters to spread freely across multiple candidates a given total budget of votes. Cumulative voting is designed to increase the representation of minorities (Guinier, 1994;Issacharoff et al, 2002), and has been shown to do so effectively, theoretically (Cox, 1990), empirically (Pildes and Donoghue, 1995;Bowler et al, 2003) and experimentally (Gerber et al, 1998).…”

Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy

“… 6 See Schram and Sonnemans (1996), Morton and Williams (1999), Hung and Plott (2001), Goeree and Holt (2005), Großer and Schram (2006), Casella, Gelman and Palfrey (2006), Levine and Palfrey (2007), and Battaglini, Morton and Palfrey (2006) among others. …”

Storable votes

“…We address this question in a companion experimental paper (Casella et al, 2003). The experimental subjects did not, for the most part, cast the equilibrium number of votes, but they consistently did cast more votes when intensities were higher.…”