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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Tommaso Colussi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore; Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Ingo Isphording; Nico Pestel |
| Abstract: | We investigate how changes in the salience of a minority group affect the majority group’s voting behavior. Specifically, we focus on Muslim communities and their increased salience in daily life during Ramadan. To estimate a causal effect, we exploit exogenous variation in the distance of German federal and state elections to the month of Ramadan over the 1980–2013 period. Our findings reveal an increased polarization of the electorate: vote shares for both right- and left-wing extremist parties increase in municipalities where mosques are located when the election date is closer to Ramadan. We use individual-level survey data to provide evidence on potential mechanisms. During Ramadan respondents perceive the share of foreign-born people living in their country as larger and reveal more negative attitudes towards Muslims. We complement these findings with evidence on increased numbers of violent attacks against Muslim communities shortly after Ramadan. |
| Keywords: | Salience, Muslims, Behavioral Political Economy, Right-Wing Extremism. |
| JEL: | D72 D74 J15 D91 |
| Date: | 2019–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctc:serie1:def080&r=all |
| By: | Nicolas Querou (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier) |
| Abstract: | We consider a setting where agents are subject to two types of collective action problems, any group user's individual extraction inducing an externality on others in the same group (intra-group problem), while aggregate extraction in one group induces an externality on each agent in other groups (intergroup problem). One illustrative example of such a setting corresponds to a case where a common-pool resource is jointly extracted in local areas, which are managed by separate groups of individuals extracting the resource in their respective location. The interplay between both types of externality is shown to affect the results obtained in classical models of common-pool resources. We show how the fundamentals affect the individual strategies and welfare compared to the benchmark commons problems. Finally, different initiatives (local cooperation, inter-area agreements) are analyzed to assess whether they may alleviate the problems, and to understand the conditions under which they do so. |
| Keywords: | externalities,common-pool resource,collective action |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpceem:halshs-01936007&r=all |
| By: | Diamantoudi, Effrosyni; Sartzetakis, Eftichios; Strantza, Stefania |
| Abstract: | The paper examines the stability of self-enforcing International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) among heterogeneous countries, allowing for transfers. We employ a two-stage, non-cooperative model of coalition formation. In the first stage each country decides whether or not to join the agreement, while in the second stage countries choose their emissions simultaneously. Coalition members agree also to share the gains from cooperation in the first stage. We use quadratic benefit and environmental damage functions and assume two types of countries differing in their sensitivity to the global pollutant. In examining the impact of transfers on the coalition size, we apply the notion of Potential Internal Stability (PIS). Results show that transfers can increase cooperation among heterogeneous countries. However, the increase in the coalition size, relative to the case without transfers, comes only from countries belonging to the type with the lower environmental damages, which are drawn into the coalition by the transfers offered. Furthermore, the level of cooperation increases with the degree of heterogeneity. However, the reduction in aggregate emissions achieved by the enlarged coalition is very small leading to dismal improvement in welfare, which confirms the "paradox of cooperation". |
| Keywords: | Environmental Economics and Policy |
| Date: | 2018–06–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:feemci:273370&r=all |
| By: | Hans Gersbach (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Akaki Mamageishvili (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Oriol Tejada (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) |
| Abstract: | We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote. In the second round, after the results of the first round have been published, the remaining citizens decide whether to vote for one alternative or to abstain. The votes from both rounds are aggregated, and the final outcome is obtained by applying the majority rule, with ties being broken by fair randomization. Within a costly voting framework, we show that large electorates will choose the preferred alternative of the majority with high probability, and that average costs will be low. This result is in contrast with the literature on one-round voting, which predicts either higher voting costs (when voting is compulsory) or decisions that often do not represent the preferences of the majority (when voting is voluntary). |
| Keywords: | voting; referenda; rational behavior |
| JEL: | C72 D70 D72 |
| Date: | 2017–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eth:wpswif:17-284&r=all |
| By: | Mehic, Adrian (Department of Economics, Lund University) |
| Abstract: | Between the 2014 and 2018 Swedish parliamentary elections, the vote share of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats increased significantly. To evaluate the possibility of a causal link between immigration and the right-wing populist vote, this paper uses data from a nationwide policy experiment, under which refugees are allocated randomly to every municipality in the country, creating exogenous variation in the number of refugees between municipalities. Overall, I find a positive and significant impact of immigration on the anti-immigration vote. In areas with strong anti-immigration sentiments during the 1990s refugee wave, the effect is magnified significantly. However, when considering immigration of a particular refugee group dominated by young men, the relationship is considerably weaker. I show that this is because immigration of young men has a balancing effect on the right-wing populist vote among immigration-friendly voter groups. |
| Keywords: | immigration; right-wing populism; natural experiment |
| JEL: | D72 J15 P16 |
| Date: | 2019–03–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2019_005&r=all |
| By: | Mamadou Gueye (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier); Nicolas Querou (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier); Raphaël Soubeyran (CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - FRE2010 - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - UM - Université de Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we use a laboratory experiment to analyze the relationship between equity and coordination success in a game with Pareto ranked equilibria. Equity is decreased by increasing the coordination payoffs of some subjects while the coordination payoffs of others remain unchanged. Theoretically, in this setting, difference aversion may lead to a positive relationship between equity and coordination success, while social welfare motivations may lead to a negative relationship. Using a within-subject experimental design, we find that less equity unambiguously leads to a higher level of coordination success. Moreover, this result holds even for subjects whose payoffs remain unchanged. Our results suggest that social welfare motivations drives the negative relationship between equity and coordination success found in this experiment. Moreover, our data suggest that the order of treatment matters. Groups facing first the treatment with high inequality in coordination payoffs, then the treatment with low inequality in coordination payoffs, reach the Pareto dominant equilibrium more often in both treatments compared to groups playing first the treatment with low inequality in coordination payoffs, then the treatment with high inequality in coordination payoffs. |
| Keywords: | effciency,social welfare motivation,equity,coordination game,difference aversion |
| Date: | 2018–12–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpceem:hal-01947414&r=all |
| By: | Vincent Merlin (TEPP - Travail, Emploi et Politiques Publiques - UPEM - Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR1 - Université de Rennes 1 - UNIV-RENNES - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Ipek Özkal Sanver (Murat Sertel Center for Advanced Economic Studies - Istanbul Bilgi University); Mehmet Remzi Sanver (LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision - Université Paris-Dauphine - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSL - PSL Research University) |
| Abstract: | Decision makers often face a dilemma when they have to arbitrate between the quantity of support for a decision (i.e., the number of people who back it) and the quality of support (i.e., at which level to go down in voters' preferences to obtain sufficient level of support). The trade-off between the quality and quantity of support behind alternatives led to numerous suggestions in social choice theory: without being exhaustive we can mentionMajoritarian Compromise, Fallback Bargaining, Set of Efficient Compromises, Condorcet Practical Method, Median Voting Rule, Majority Judgement. Our point is that all these concepts share a common feature which enables us to gather them in the same class, the class of compromise rules, which are all based upon elementary scoring rules described extensively by Saari. One can exploit his results to analyze the compromise rules with relative ease, which is a major point of our paper. |
| Keywords: | Compromise,Voting,Scoring rules,Borda,Condorcet,Saari |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02065282&r=all |
| By: | Koopmans, Ruud |
| Abstract: | Minorities' claims for rights increasingly clash with majorities who wish to retain and defend "national" cultural and religious traditions. Debates around minarets in Switzerland, burqas in France, Saint Nicolas' companion "Black Pete" in the Netherlands, and about freedom of speech versus respect for minorities in several countries are cases in point. Such issues are highly salient and offer a major mobilization potential for populist parties. However, while publications about minority rights abound, the normative literature is remarkably silent on the issue of the normative legitimacy of rights claims by autochthonous cultural majorities. The reason for this negligence is the assumption that majorities can, by definition, impose their will by electoral force. But in the postwar rights regime in which protection for minority rights has proliferated, there are many situations in which parliamentary majorities have been trumped by court decisions or obligations derived from international treaties. Moreover, even if electoral majorities prevail, this does not solve the normative problem and leads to situations in which claims of minorities, legitimated by national and supranational minority protection norms, stand against majorities backed by the electoral power of numbers but lacking normative legitimacy. The paper argues that it is this dynamic of "right" versus "might" that is an important structural factor behind the rise of nationalist populism across Western countries. This confrontation has a tendency to polarize and to escalate, because there is no common normative ground on which the legitimacy and limits of majority rights claims can be negotiated. For one side in such debates, majorities have no legitimate right whatsoever to claim privileges for their language or culture over others, for the other side, this right is absolute because in the populist view democratic legitimacy is reduced to whatever the majority decides. A normative elaboration of the legitimacy and limits of cultural majority claims is necessary to escape from this confrontation that increasingly poisons the political debate in Western democracies. An additional reason to take cultural majority rights more strongly into consideration is that the idea that majority cultures are not in need of any special protection is less and less tenable. In a more and more globalized world where Anglo-Saxon culture has become the norm in many domains, the distinction between "dominant" and "minority cultures" can no longer be exclusively seen as applying to relationships within nation-states, but increasingly also applies to the unequal balance of power between the cultures of nation-states. |
| Keywords: | majority rights,self-determination,immigration,indigenous peoples,populism,multiculturalism |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wzbmit:spvi2018106&r=all |
| By: | Pedro Dal Bo; Andrew Foster; Kenju Kamei |
| Abstract: | "Dal Bó, Foster and Putterman (2010) show experimentally that the effect of a policy may be greater when it is democratically selected than when it is exogenously imposed. In this paper we propose a new and simpler identification strategy to measure this democracy effect. We derive the distribution of the statistic of the democracy effect, and apply the new strategy to the data from Dal Bó, Foster and Putterman (2010) and data from a new real-effort experiment in which subjects’ payoffs do not depend on the effort of others. The new identification strategy is based on calculating the average behavior under democracy by weighting the behavior of each type of voter by its prevalence in the whole population (and not conditional on the vote outcome). We show that use of these weights eliminates selection effects under certain conditions. Application of this method to the data in Dal Bó, Foster and Putterman (2010) confirms the presence of the democracy effect in that experiment, but no such effect is found for the real-effort experiment." |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bro:econwp:2019-4&r=all |
| By: | Cantoni, Davide; Yang, David Y; Yuchtman, Noam; Zhang, Y Jane |
| Abstract: | Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual’s participation a function of their beliefs about others’ turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates individuals’ beliefs about others’ protest participation, in the context of Hong Kong’s ongoing antiauthoritarian movement. We elicit subjects’ planned participation in an upcoming protest and their prior beliefs about others’ participation, in an incentivized manner. One day before the protest, we randomly provide a subset of subjects with truthful information about others’ protest plans and elicit posterior beliefs about protest turnout, again in an incentivized manner. After the protest, we elicit subjects’ actual participation. This allows us to identify the causal effects of positively and negatively updated beliefs about others’ protest participation on subjects’ own turnout. In contrast with the assumptions of many recent models of protest participation, we consistently find evidence of strategic substitutability. We provide guidance regarding plausible sources of strategic substitutability that can be incorporated into theoretical models of protests. |
| JEL: | D80 D74 P00 |
| Date: | 2019–01–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:100316&r=all |
| By: | Laszlo A. Koczy (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics) |
| Abstract: | In coalitional games with uncertain payoffs, a deviating coalition can only form expectations regarding its post-deviation payoff. Classical approaches address the problem from the side of conservatism, expecting the worst, or by explicit assumptions of the emerging state of the world. We borrow the idea of risk from the finance literature and compare the payoff of staying with the original outcome with the risk of deviating. Employing this idea to the core leads to a new concept that we call the risk-based core. We introduce this concept and discuss its properties. We find an inclusion relation between cores of games with increasingly conservative players. The model is also suitable to study cooperative games in partition function form where the value of a coalition depends on the entire partition. For the cores of such games our main result yields many of the familiar inclusion relations as corollaries, while the inclusion of the optimistic core in the optimistic recursive core turns out to be non-robust. |
| Keywords: | Cooperative game theory; Core; Expectation formation rules; Risk, Risk measures; Partition function form games |
| JEL: | C71 D82 G32 |
| Date: | 2019–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:1906&r=all |
| By: | Liyang Han; Thomas Morstyn; Constance Crozier; Malcolm McCulloch |
| Abstract: | Among the various market structures under peer-to-peer energy sharing, one model based on cooperative game theory provides clear incentives for prosumers to collaboratively schedule their energy resources. The computational complexity of this model, however, increases exponentially with the number of participants. To address this issue, this paper proposes the application of K-means clustering to the energy profiles following the grand coalition optimization. The cooperative model is run with the "clustered players" to compute their payoff allocations, which are then further distributed among the prosumers within each cluster. Case studies show that the proposed method can significantly improve the scalability of the cooperative scheme while maintaining a high level of financial incentives for the prosumers. |
| Date: | 2019–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1903.10965&r=all |