Ballot Richness and Information Aggregation

Abstract:

We study voting when committee members have different information quality. In such environments, more complex rules can help voters better aggregate information by endogenously allocating more decision power to better informed members. Using laboratory experiments, we compare two polar examples of voting rules in terms of complexity: majority voting (MV) and continuous voting (CV). Our results show that CV outperforms MV on average, although the difference is smaller than predicted, and that CV has more support than MV in treatments where it is expected to perform better. We also find that voters with intermediate information overestimate the importance of their votes under CV.