Communication and Information in Games of Collective Decision: A Survey of Experimental Results

36 Pages Posted: 29 Jan 2018

See all articles by César Martinelli

César Martinelli

George Mason University - Department of Economics

Thomas R. Palfrey

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Date Written: December 24, 2017

Abstract

This paper surveys research of lab experiments on voting games, focusing on six areas that have received much attention in the last few decades: (i) costly voting in elections with two alternatives; (ii) (other) collective action problems; (iii) elections with more than two alternatives; (iv) electoral competition and democratic accountability with imperfect information; (v) information aggregation in committees and juries; and (vi) legislative bargaining. We draw two key lessons from the work reviewed. First, strategic behavior is pervasive in voting games, as opposed to naive or “sincere” behavior. That is, voters do attempt to play best responses to other voters’ strategies. Second, social motivations impart an effect on the behavior of players in voting games. Specifically, the welfare of the group of reference induced by the experiment (which may not be the entire “society” participating in the experiment) seems to be an effective motivation in several cases. The paper concludes by identifying some open research questions.

Keywords: collective action, voting games, preplay communication

JEL Classification: D71, D72, C91, C92

Suggested Citation

Martinelli, César and Palfrey, Thomas R., Communication and Information in Games of Collective Decision: A Survey of Experimental Results (December 24, 2017). GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 18-01, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3111982 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3111982

César Martinelli (Contact Author)

George Mason University - Department of Economics ( email )

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Fairfax, VA 22030
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Thomas R. Palfrey

California Institute of Technology - Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences ( email )

1200 East California Blvd.
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Pasadena, CA 91125
United States
626-395-4088 (Phone)
626-4432-1726 (Fax)

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