Flip a coin or vote? An experiment on the implementation and efficiency of social choice mechanisms

Timo Hoffmann; Sander Renes

doi:10.1007/s10683-021-09724-9

Flip a coin or vote? An experiment on the implementation and efficiency of social choice mechanisms

Timo Hoffmann, Sander Renes^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Corporate boards, experts panels, parliaments, cabinets, and even nations all take important decisions as a group. Selecting an efficient decision rule to aggregate individual opinions is paramount to the decision quality of these groups. In our experiment we measure revealed preferences over and efficiency of several important decision rules. Our results show that: (1) the efficiency of the theoretically optimal rule is not as robust as simple majority voting, and efficiency rankings in the lab can differ from theory; (2) participation constraints often hinder implementation of more efficient mechanisms; (3) these constraints are relaxed if the less efficient mechanism is risky; (4) participation preferences appear to be driven by realized rather than theoretic payoffs of the decision rules. These findings highlight the difficulty of relying on theory alone to predict what mechanism is better and acceptable to the participants in practice.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	624-655
Number of pages	32
Journal	Experimental Economics
Volume	25
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09724-9
Publication status	Published - Apr 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Financial support from the German research foundation (DFG), via SFB 884 Political Economy of Reforms, is gratefully acknowledged.

Funding Information:
We appreciate the comments and the advice received (in alphabetical order) from Dirk Engelmann, Hans Peter Gr?ner, Eckhard Janeba, Henrik Orzen, Jeroen Suijs, Bauke Visser, as well as Lata Gangadharan [editor], Marie Claire Villeval [editor], and three anonymous reviewers. Furthermore, we appreciate the feedback of participants at the ESA conference in Heidelberg, the SEET meeting in Malta, the Bavarian Micro Day in Passau, the SABE conference in Wageningen, the Game Theory Society World Congress in Maastricht, the EEA meeting in Geneva and seminar participants in Mannheim, Nuremberg and Rotterdam. Financial support from the German research foundation (DFG), SFB 884 is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are our own S. Renes, Raw data, the programs used to analyze the data, and the programs used to run the experiment are available from the EUR Data Repository under DOI: 10.25397/eur.14687301

Funding Information:
We appreciate the comments and the advice received (in alphabetical order) from Dirk Engelmann, Hans Peter Grüner, Eckhard Janeba, Henrik Orzen, Jeroen Suijs, Bauke Visser, as well as Lata Gangadharan [editor], Marie Claire Villeval [editor], and three anonymous reviewers. Furthermore, we appreciate the feedback of participants at the ESA conference in Heidelberg, the SEET meeting in Malta, the Bavarian Micro Day in Passau, the SABE conference in Wageningen, the Game Theory Society World Congress in Maastricht, the EEA meeting in Geneva and seminar participants in Mannheim, Nuremberg and Rotterdam. Financial support from the German research foundation (DFG), SFB 884 is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are our own S. Renes, Raw data, the programs used to analyze the data, and the programs used to run the experiment are available from the EUR Data Repository under DOI: 10.25397/eur.14687301

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).

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Cite this

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abstract = "Corporate boards, experts panels, parliaments, cabinets, and even nations all take important decisions as a group. Selecting an efficient decision rule to aggregate individual opinions is paramount to the decision quality of these groups. In our experiment we measure revealed preferences over and efficiency of several important decision rules. Our results show that: (1) the efficiency of the theoretically optimal rule is not as robust as simple majority voting, and efficiency rankings in the lab can differ from theory; (2) participation constraints often hinder implementation of more efficient mechanisms; (3) these constraints are relaxed if the less efficient mechanism is risky; (4) participation preferences appear to be driven by realized rather than theoretic payoffs of the decision rules. These findings highlight the difficulty of relying on theory alone to predict what mechanism is better and acceptable to the participants in practice.",

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Flip a coin or vote? An experiment on the implementation and efficiency of social choice mechanisms

Abstract

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Flip a coin or vote? An experiment on the implementation and efficiency of social choice mechanisms

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