Can we devise mechanisms that allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences when monetary transfers are forbidden? Can minorities be decisive over those issues they feel very strongly about? As opposed to the usual voting system (one person-one decision-one vote), we propose a voting system where each agent is endowed with a fixed number of votes that can be distributed freely among a set of issues that need to be approved or dismissed. Its novelty relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. This voting system is optimal in a well-defined sense: in a strategic setting with two voters, two issues and preference intensities uniformly and independently distributed across possible values, Qualitative Voting Pareto dominates Majority Rule and, moreover, achieves the only ex-ante optimal (incentive compatible) allocation. The result also holds true with three voters as long as the voters preferences towards the issues differ sufficiently.
¿Podemos encontrar un mecanismo sin transferencias monetarias que permita a los votantes expresar la intensidad de sus preferencias? ¿Puede la opinión de una minoría ser respetada cuando la intensidad de sus preferencias es muy superior a la intensidad de las preferencias de la mayoría? En este artículo proponemos una alternativa al sistema común de votación (una persona - una decisión - un voto) en la que cada agente dispone de un cierto número de votos que pueden ser libremente distribuidos entre una número predeterminado de decisiones. Lo novedoso de este sistema de votación es que permite a los votantes expresar cuánto les importa cada decisión. Caracterizamos condiciones suficientes en las que este sistema de votación es óptimo y superior a la regla de la mayoría.
Rafael Hortalá-Vallvé. Government Department. Houghton Street. London - WC2A 2AE. United Kingdom
I am particularly indebted to Leonardo Felli and Andrea Prat. I thank Tilman Borgers, Berta Esteve-Volart, Matthew Jackson, Gilat Levy, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Rocco Macchiavello, Ronny Razin, Juan Pablo Rud, Barbara Veronese and seminar participants at a number of conferences for helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the Stern School of Business at NYU and the Center for Government, Business and Society at Kellogg for their generous hospitality. Finally, I should express my gratitude to François Ortalo-Magné for encouraging me in the first steps of this research. Financial support from Fundación Ramón Areces and Fundación Rafael del Pino is gratefully acknowledged.