Ballot Richness and Information Aggregation

Abstract:

When voters have different information quality, voting rules with richer ballot spaces can help voters better aggregate information by endogenously allocating more decision power to better-informed members. Using laboratory experiments, we compare two polar examples of voting rules in terms of ballot richness: majority voting (MV) and continuous voting (CV). Our results show that CV outperforms MV on average, although the difference is smaller than predicted, and that CV has more support than MV in treatments where it is expected to perform better. We also find that voters with intermediate information overestimate the importance of their votes under CV.

Dimitrios Xefteris, University of Cyprus