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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Hélia Marreiros (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Católica Porto Business School and CEGE) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines experimentally the effects of social identity and communication on teams’ distributional rules and wealth creation. The context studied is team production with multiple resource owners of different skills. In these organizational settings, heterogeneity of skills might create a conflict between equity, equality and social welfare. The results of a two-stage experiment, where participants vote in the distributional rule in stage I and make their effort decisions in stage II, indicate that induced group identity prompts preferences for equality even at the expense of wealth creation. We find that compared to a setting where social interaction is absent, identity does not increase team productivity, but equalizes individual payoffs. These findings suggest that group identity triggers the wide spread use of equal sharing rules by heterogeneous teams, as it increases the team’s level of egalitarianism. This paper provides recommendations for organizational decisionmaking. |
| Keywords: | Teams; Heterogeneous skills; Social identity; Communication; Voting; Distributional preferences; Experiments. |
| JEL: | C92 D31 D63 J33 M52 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cap:wpaper:022019&r=all |
| By: | Julia Cage (Département d'économie); Yasmine Bekkouche (Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics (PSE)) |
| Abstract: | What is the price of a vote? This paper investigates this consequential controversy by analyzing a new comprehensive dataset of all French municipal and legislative elections over the 1993-2014 period. We begin by documenting the evolution of campaign finance in France, and show that both the amount and sources of campaign contributions vary widely from one candidate to another, in particular depending on their political party. We then turn to the empirical analysis and tackle a number of empirical challenges. First, we rely on recent methodological innovations to handle the special characteristics of multiparty data. Second, to overcome the endogenous nature of campaign spending, we propose a new instrument based on a change in legislation. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently increases a candidate's vote share both for municipal and legislative elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on the parties and on the sources of campaign funding. According to our estimations, the price of a vote is about 6 euros for the legislative elections, and 32 euros for the municipal ones. Simulations show that small changes in spending patterns and caps can have a large impact on electoral outcomes and seats. Our results suggest that political finance needs to be tightly regulated. |
| Keywords: | Campaign expenditures; Campaign finance reform; Campaign financing; Elections; Multiparty electoral data |
| JEL: | D72 H72 P48 |
| Date: | 2018–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/7rcgbs4v788terphdvb6a5e8t8&r=all |
| By: | Bosetti, Valentina; Heugues, Melanie; Tavoni, Alessandro |
| Abstract: | We explore the prospects of cooperation in a threshold public bad game. The experiment’s setup allows us to investigate the issue of effort coordination between signatories and non-signatories to a climate agreement under the threat of a catastrophe. Motivated actors may signal willingness to lead by committing a share of investments to a ‘clean’ but less remunerative project. The game is parametrized such that the externality cannot be fully internalized by the coalition, so that some effort on the part of the second movers is required if the catastrophic losses are to be avoided. We manipulate both the relative returns of two investments and the extent to which the gains from leadership diffuse to second movers. We find that the likelihood of reaching a sizeable coalition of early investors in the clean technology is higher when the benefits are appropriated by the coalition. Conversely, spillovers can entice second movers’ adoption. |
| JEL: | C70 C92 Q50 |
| Date: | 2017–04–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:68931&r=all |
| By: | Casella, Alessandra; sanchez, luis |
| Abstract: | Storable Votes and Quadratic Voting are voting systems designed to account for voters' intensity of preferences. We test their performance in two samples of California residents using data on four initiatives prepared for the 2016 California ballot. We bootstrap the original samples and generate two sets of 10,000 multi-elections simulations. As per design, both systems induce minority victories and result in higher expected welfare relative to majority voting. In our parametrization, quadratic voting induces more minority victories and achieves higher average welfare, but causes more frequent inefficient minority victories. The results are robust to different plausible rules-of-thumb in casting votes. |
| Keywords: | democracy; majority; voting |
| JEL: | D70 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13479&r=all |
| By: | Hideo Konishi (Boston College); Chen-Yu Pan (Wuhan University) |
| Abstract: | We consider a sequential formation of alliances à la Bloch (1996) and Okada (1996) followed by a two-stage contest in which alliances first compete with each other, and then the members in the winning alliance compete again for an indivisible prize. In contrast to Konishi and Pan (2019) which adopted an open-membership game as the alliance formation process, alliances are allowed to limit their memberships (excludable alliances). We show that if members' efforts are strongly complementary to each other, there will be exactly two asymmetric alliances the larger alliance is formed first and then the rest of the players form the smaller one. This result contrasts with the one under open membership, where moderate complementarity is necessary to support a two-alliance structure. It is also in stark contrast with Bloch et al. (2006), where they show that a grand coalition is formed in the same game if the prize is divisible and a binding contract is possible to avoid further conflicts after an alliance wins the prize. |
| Keywords: | contest, alliance, coalition formation, complementarity |
| JEL: | D23 D72 D74 |
| Date: | 2019–01–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:973&r=all |
| By: | Santiago J. Rubio (Department of Economic Analysis and ERI-CES, University of Valencia) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the impact of adaptation on the stability of an international emission agreement. To address this issue we solve a three-stage coalition formation game where in the first stage countries decide whether or not to sign the agreement. Then, in the second stage, signatories (playing together) and non-signatories (playing individually) select their levels of emissions. Finally, in the third stage, each country decides on its level of adaptation non co-operatively. We solve this game for two models. For both, it is assumed that damages are linear with respect to emissions which guarantee that emissions are strategic complements in the second stage of the game. However, for the first model adaptation reduces the marginal damages of emissions in a multiplicative way whereas for the second model the reduction occurs in an additive way. Our analysis shows that the models yield different predictions in terms of participation. In the first case, we find that the larger the gains of full cooperation, the larger the cooperation. However, in the second case, the unique stable agreement we find consists of three countries regardless of the gains of full cooperation. These results suggest that complementarity can play in favor of cooperation but that it is not a sufficient condition to obtain more participation in an emission agreement. Finally, we would like to point out that our research indicates that the way adaptation reduces damages plays a critical role over the outcome of the coalition formation game. |
| Keywords: | International Environmental Agreements, Mitigation-Adaptation Game, Strategic Complements |
| JEL: | D62 F53 H41 Q54 |
| Date: | 2018–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2018.29&r=all |
| By: | Couttenier, Mathieu; Hatte, Sophie; Thoenig, Mathias; Vlachos, Stephanos |
| Abstract: | We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%). |
| Keywords: | Immigration; populism; Violent Crimes; Vote |
| JEL: | D72 K42 L82 Z12 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13496&r=all |
| By: | Korkut Alp Erturk |
| Abstract: | The paper explores how elites can develop capacity for collective agency through coordination. Elites’ challenge is to simultaneously deter the state from abusing power while at the same time relying on it to discipline defectors in their midst. The basic insight holds that the credibility of the state’s threats depends on the cost of carrying them out, which elites can have control over if they can act in tandem. Elites can coordinate in being compliant when the ruler’s threats serve their collective interest which raises the threats’ credibility, while lowering that of those they dislike by their coordinated noncompliance making them costly to carry out. |
| Keywords: | elite collective agency, state power, coordination, credible threats, subgame imperfect equilibrium |
| JEL: | C72 D72 D02 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uta:papers:2019_04&r=all |
| By: | Marie-Laure Cabon-Dhersin (CREAM - Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquée à la Mondialisation - UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - IRIHS - Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Homme et Société - UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université); Romain Gibert (CREAM - Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquée à la Mondialisation - UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - IRIHS - Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Homme et Société - UNIROUEN - Université de Rouen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université) |
| Abstract: | This article investigates two research funding policies in a cooperative and a non-cooperative R&D setting: subsidising private research (Spr) and subsidising public research (Spu). We show that R&D cooperation with subsidies (either Spr or Spu) always performs better than R&D cooperation with no subsidy. Furthermore, the Spr policy leads to better performance than the Spu approach does in terms of overall net surplus whether the rms cooperate or not in R&D. Nevertheless, comparing the two research funding policies for the same level of public spending shows that the Spu policy with R&D cooperation is in some cases more eective than the Spr policy, the latter becoming too costly for the government when spillovers are high. |
| Keywords: | R&D Cooperation,R&D spillovers,Knowledge public externalities,Subsidies,Public policy,H2,H4,L3,L5,03,C7 |
| Date: | 2018–11–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02006515&r=all |
| By: | Panagiotis Konstantinou (AUEB); Theodore Panagiotidis (Department of Economics, University of Macedonia); Costas Roumanias (Department of International and European Economic Studies, Athens University of Economics and Business) |
| Abstract: | In models of voter participation, the effects of election margin and campaign expenditure can be shown to be state-dependent - varying with low/high turnout. We empirically assess these implications for observed turnout, employing data from US House elections from 2000 to 2008 by means of quantile regression analysis. We document that the effects of expected election margin and campaign spending on turnout are state-dependent: the later is positive and decreasing, whereas the former is negative and U-shaped. Other determinants' influence on turnout (e.g. education, population density) is also shown to vary across the conditional distribution of turnout rate. Our findings are robust to a number of extensions. |
| Keywords: | Voter Turnout, Election Margin, Campaign Expenditure, Quantile Regression |
| JEL: | C21 D72 |
| Date: | 2019–01–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aue:wpaper:1902&r=all |
| By: | Hideo Konishi (Boston College); Chen-Yu Pan (Wuhan University) |
| Abstract: | Esteban and Sakovics (2003) showed in their three-person game that an alliance never appears in a possibly multi-stage contest game for an indivisible prize when allies’ efforts are perfectly substitutable. In this paper, we introduce allies’ effort complementarity by using a CES effort aggregator function. We consider an open-membership alliance formation game followed by two contests: the one played by alliances, and the one within the winning alliance. We show that if allies’ efforts are too substitutable or too complementary, no meaningful alliance appears in equilibrium. However, if allies’ efforts are moderately complementary to each other, then competition between two alliances is a subgame perfect equilibrium, which Pareto-dominates the equilibrium in a noalliance single-stage contest. We also show that if forming more than two alliances is supported in equilibrium, then it Pareto-dominates two alliance equilibrium. Nevertheless, the parameter space for such an allocation to be supported as an equilibrium shrinks when the number of alliances increases. |
| Keywords: | contest, alliance, coalition formation, complementarity |
| JEL: | D23 D72 D74 |
| Date: | 2019–02–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:974&r=all |
| By: | de Janvry, Alain; Emerick, Kyle; Kelley, Erin; Sadoulet, Elisabeth |
| Abstract: | Can agents in a social network be induced to obtain information from outside their peer groups? Using a field experiment in rural Bangladesh, we show that demonstration plots in agriculture - a technique where the first users of a new variety cultivate it in a side-by-side comparison with an existing variety - facilitate social learning by inducing conversations and information sharing outside of existing social networks. We compare these improvements in learning with those from seeding new technology with more central farmers in village social networks. The demonstration plots - when cultivated by randomly selected farmers - improve knowledge by just as much as seeding with more central farmers. Moreover, the demonstration plots only induce conversations and facilitate learning for farmers that were unconnected to entry points at baseline. Finally, we combine this diffusion experiment with an impact experiment to show that both demonstration plots and improved seeding transmit information to farmers that are less likely to benefit from the new innovation. |
| Keywords: | agriculture; Social learning; Technology adoption |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13507&r=all |
| By: | Juan Pineiro-Chousa (USC - Universidade de Santiago de Compostela [Spain]); Marcos Vizcaíno-González (Universidade da Coruña); Jérôme Caby (IAE Paris - Sorbonne Business School) |
| Abstract: | This research seeks to investigate the connection between market capitalisation and the voting pattern related to proposals about executive compensation and directors' election, using data about banks from the U.S.A. concerning the 2003-2013 period. Our findings indicate that there is a direct relationship between voting pattern and market capitalisation, suggesting that they are mutually interdependent. When the market value of the bank increases (decreases), the support given by shareholders through their votes in meetings increases (decreases) as well. Also, when the approval showed by shareholders to managerial proposals through their voting decisions gets higher (lower), the market value of the bank gets higher (lower) too. |
| Date: | 2018–02–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02001463&r=all |