TY  - JOUR
AU  - Casella,Alessandra
AU  - Palfrey,Thomas
AU  - Riezman,Raymond
TI  - Minorities and Storable Votes
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11674
PY  - 2005
Y2  - October 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11674
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11674.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alessandra Casella
Department of Economics
Columbia University
420 West 118 Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-2459
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: ac186@columbia.edu

Thomas Palfrey
Division of HSS
 Mail Code 228-77
California Institute of Technology 
Pasadena, CA 91125
E-Mail: trp@hss.caltech.edu

Raymond G.. Riezman
Department of Economics  
Henry B. Tippie College of Business
W360 PBB  
University of Iowa 
Iowa City, IA 52242-1000 
E-Mail: raymond-riezman@uiowa.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-10-03
AB  - The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desidered over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most important, the minority can win occasionally. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only of its strength of preferences is high and the majority's strength of preferences is low. The result is that aggregate efficiency either falls little or in fact rises. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by a series of experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory.
ER  -