Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting. An Experiment on Four California Propositions

Casella, Alessandra; Sánchez, Luis Ignacio Ballesteros

doi:10.3386/w25510

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Using a one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game, Horton et al (2011) show that there is no statistically significant difference between the likelihood of cooperation across the MTurk and physical lab samples. 5 MTurk surveys have also been widely used by economists to elicit policy preferences over tax schemes (Fisman et al, 2017) and redistribution (Kuziemko et al, 2015), and evaluating the performance of voting schemes (Casella & Sanchez, 2019).…”

Section: Mturk Samplementioning

confidence: 99%

Political polarization and cooperation during a pandemic

Cornelson

Miloucheva

2022

Health Economics

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In a world where externalities are rife, transactions take time, and information is imperfect, market mechanisms alone will not guarantee efficiency. Trust in others' competence and decency, and concern for their well-being, can help economic actors to coordinate their behavior and achieve better outcomes.It is of some concern, then, that Americans feel a decreasing level of trust and increasing hostility along party lines. Gentzkow (2016) reports that, as of 2008, nearly half of Americans classified members of the other party as "selfish", up from around 20% in 1960. The same report shows that 20%-30% of Americans would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the other party, up from around 5% in 1960. The difference in individual's warmth toward their own party and their warmth toward the other party, each on a scale of 0-100, has increased from around 25 points in 1980 to 45 points today . This hostility may be particularly problematic when members of different parties have to work together to combat a crisis, as has recently occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing poses a classic collective action problem: while the costs of preventative behavior accrue entirely to the individual, the benefits are diffused across a large number of people. It is in precisely this situation that social preferences might help to restore more efficient outcomes. If individuals are altruistic, they internalize some of the utility costs their actions have on other people. When altruism breaks down, society's ability to overcome the collective action problem may be compromised. While this argument has been made in the context of ethnic fractionalization (e.g., Poterba, 1997; Vigdor, 2004), until recently there has been little empirical work examining the consequences of political fragmentation for public goods provision. 1 In this paper, we fill this gap by examining whether political polarization has undermined the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.A simple comparison of social distancing across more or less polarized individuals or states will not identify the impact of polarization, because both polarization and willingness to comply with social distancing may be related to other, unobserved

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Section: Mturk Samplementioning

confidence: 99%

Political polarization and cooperation during a pandemic

Cornelson

Miloucheva

2022

Health Economics

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“…Are voters able to use effectively a voting rule like QV with voices? To begin addressing these questions outside the controlled environment of the lab, Casella & Sanchez (2019) ran an incentivized survey on Mechanical Turk, asking approximately 600 California residents to vote, using either SV or a simplified version of QV, on four propositions that were being prepared for popular vote in the 2016 California ballot. 52 The first part of the survey elicited participants' direction of preferences and asked them to distribute 100 "importance points" among the four propositions.…”

Section: Storing and Distributing Votesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The model, more transparent thanLalley & Weyl (2018) originates in a quick sketch due to Glen Weyl. Its discussion is borrowed from the online appendix toCasella & Sanchez (2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?

Casella

Macé

2021

Annu. Rev. Econ.

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Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, acquiring others’ votes when preferences are strong in exchange for giving votes away when preferences are weak. But is vote trading welfare improving or welfare decreasing? For a practice long believed to be central to collective decisions, the lack of a clear answer is surprising. We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis of logrolling, the exchange of votes for votes. We then focus on vote markets, where votes can be traded against a numeraire. We conclude with procedures allowing voters to shift votes across decisions—that is, allowing one to trade votes with oneself only. We find that vote trading and vote markets are typically inefficient; more encouraging results are obtained by allowing voters to allocate votes across decisions. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Economics, Volume 13 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…9 Storable votes (Casella 2005) constitute a possible alternative for these applications. Notably, a combination of storable votes with quadratic conversion of stored votes to votes applied to a given decision has been found to increase welfare in a survey experiment based on four ballot initiatives in California (Casella and Sánchez 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficiency in Collective Decision-Making via Quadratic Transfers

Eguia¹,

Immorlica²,

Lalley³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Consider the following collective choice problem: a group of budget constrained agents must choose one of several alternatives. Is there a budget balanced mechanism that: i) does not depend on the specific characteristics of the group, ii) does not require unaffordable transfers, and iii) implements utilitarianism if the agents' preferences are quasilinear and their private information? We study the following procedure: every agent can express any intensity of support or opposition to each alternative, by transferring to the rest of the agents wealth equal to the square of the intensity expressed; and the outcome is determined by the sums of the expressed intensities. We prove that as the group grows large, in every equilibrium of this quadratic-transfers mechanism, each agent's transfer converges to zero, and the probability that the efficient outcome is chosen converges to one.

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Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting. An Experiment on Four California Propositions

Cited by 9 publications

References 11 publications

Political polarization and cooperation during a pandemic

Political polarization and cooperation during a pandemic

Does Vote Trading Improve Welfare?

Efficiency in Collective Decision-Making via Quadratic Transfers

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