We examine an environment with n voters, each with a private value over two alternatives. We compare the social surplus of two mechanisms for deciding between them: majority voting and shouting. In majority voting, the choice with the most votes wins. With shouting, the voter who shouts the loudest (sends the costliest wasteful signal) chooses the outcome. We find that it is optimal to use voting in the case where n is large and the value for each particular alternative of the voters is bounded. For other cases, the superior mechanism is depends upon the order statistics of the distribution of values.

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Vote or Shout
1University of Exeter, s.chakravarty@exeter.ac.uk
2University of Exeter, trkaplan@exeter.ac.uk
Citation Information: The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics. Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages –, ISSN (Online) 1935-1704, DOI: 10.2202/1935-1704.1682, September 2010
Publication History:
- Published Online:
- 2010-09-20
Keywords: voting; lobbying; order statistics


















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