American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Implementation by Vote-Buying Mechanisms
American Economic Review
vol. 111,
no. 9, September 2021
(pp. 2811–28)
Abstract
Vote-buying mechanisms allow agents to express any level of support for their preferred alternative at an increasing cost. Focusing on large societies with wealth inequality, we prove that the family of binary social choice rules implemented by well-behaved vote-buying mechanisms is indexed by a single parameter, which determines the importance assigned to the agents' willingness to pay to affect outcomes and to the number of supporters for each alternative. This parameter depends solely on the elasticity of the cost function near its origin: as this elasticity decreases, the intensities of support matter relatively more for outcomes than the supporters' count.Citation
Eguia, Jon X., and Dimitrios Xefteris. 2021. "Implementation by Vote-Buying Mechanisms." American Economic Review, 111 (9): 2811–28. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20190197Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D63 Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
- D71 Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior