Minority voting and long-term decisions

In this paper we propose minority voting as a scheme that can partially protect individuals from the risk of repeated exploitation. We consider a committee that meets twice to decide about projects including a first-period project that may have long-lasting impact. In the first period, a simple open majority voting scheme takes place. Voting splits the committee into three groups: voting winners, voting losers, and absentees. Under minority voting, only voting losers retain their voting rights in the second period. We show that as soon as absolute risk aversion exceeds a threshold value, minority voting is superior to repeated application of the simple majority rule.