Efficient voting with penalties

Simple majority does not reflect the intensity of voters' preferences. This paper presents an efficient collective choice mechanism with two alternatives when the designer may use non-transferable punishments to persuade agents to reveal their private information. The designer faces a dilemma - a punishment may induce a more correct choice, but its cost is socially wasteful. The efficient mechanism is a weighted majority. Weight of each individual is known ex ante and no punishments are applied if preferences are relatively homogeneous. Eliciting types through punishments in order to construct type-specific weights should occur if preference intensity is relatively heterogeneous.