On Wednesday, March 18 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held.
Speaker: Bora Erdamar (HSE)
Title: Minorities and Efficient Referanda Mechanisms
Title: Minorities and Efficient Referanda Mechanisms
Abstract
Systematic misrepresentation of minorities is among the fundamental problems of democracies, which is usually the source of many social conflicts in societies and also source of inefficiency in terms of (utilitarian) welfare measures. Majoritarian rules -despite their simplicity and some desirable properties- are not sensitive to any intensity of preferences, hence not capable to cure this problem. Availability and increased usage of online platforms where users can express their opinions in more flexible ways signal that (i) Direct democracy tools can be used widely in near future for referanda and elections. (ii) Design of new voting mechanisms is needed to resolve the misrepresentation problem and by this way, aggregate welfare gains can also be established. Recent literature provides some promising examples of these new rules. In this survey, we examine these rules theoretically with a particular emphasis on Storable Votes and we test their performance in a field experiment.
Address: Moscow, ul. Shabolovka 28/11, Room 5307
Date
18 March
2015