Experiments in Political Economy

Abstract

Voting and elections play dual roles as social choice systems. On the one hand, they act as a preference aggregation system: they are used to choose between different alternatives when citizens do not agree on their preferred choices. On the other hand, they act as an information aggregation system: when individuals share the same preferences but each has only partial information on the state of the world, a voting system can be used to aggregate the decentralized information, increasing the probability of choosing the best alternative.