Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
5071339 Games and Economic Behavior 2017 39 Pages PDF
Abstract
We consider the performance and incentive compatibility of voting rules in a Bayesian environment: agents have independent private values, there are at least three alternatives, and monetary transfers are prohibited. First, we show that in a neutral environment, meaning alternatives are symmetric ex-ante, essentially any ex-post Pareto efficient ordinal rule is incentive compatible. Importantly, however, we can improve upon ordinal rules. We show that we can design an incentive compatible cardinal rule which achieves higher utilitarian social welfare than any ordinal rule. Finally, we provide numerical findings about incentive compatible cardinal rules that maximize utilitarian social welfare.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
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