Mechanisms for Efficient Voting with Private Information About Preferences

In games of conflict, players typically have an incentive to exaggerate their interests. This concerns issues ranging from negotiations between political parties to conflict resolution within marriages. We experimentally study this problem using a simple voting game where information about preferences is private. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences. The exogenous linking mechanism by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) captures nearly all achievable efficiency gains. Repeated interaction in various settings, which could allow endogenous linking mechanisms to evolve, leads to significant gains in truthful representation and efficiency only when players can choose their partners.

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