Suchergebnisse

The demand-revealing method of making public choices, in its original form, has a feature that many people regard as unjust, ie, it gives too much voting power to the wealthy. This objection can be overcome by adopting the generalized demand-revealing method defined as follows. There are N voters Vi (i = 1,2, $..., N) & (for simplicity) just two options or candidates A & B. Voter Vi "puts up" an amount xi of money & T is defined as summation i of fi (xi), where fi is a continuous strictly increasing unbounded function such that fi (0) = 0. Option B is adopted if T greater than 0 & not if T less than 0. Then Vi pays nothing if T - fi (xi), denoted by Si, has the same sign as T, ie, if Vi did not affect the outcome. Otherwise he is charged an amount fi to the -1 power (absolute value of Si) where fi to the -1 power denotes the inverse function of fi. The ordinary method has fi(x) = x for all i & x. A complete proof that this procedure motivates honesty is given, & this also supplies a proof for the ordinary case, which had not been previously published in complete detail. 1 Figure. AA.

In strategic settings a player may be able to influence the behavior of an opponent by revealing information about their own characteristics. They may for example aim to exploit stereotypes held by others. We provide an experimental test of this. A substantial fraction of players in a trust game exhibit a positive willingness to pay to reveal a photograph of themselves to their randomly-assigned partner. This suggests that they perceive that they can use their own characteristics to influence the behavior of others. The demand for such self-revelation depends negatively on price.

N. Tideman & G. Tullock ("A New and Superior Principle for Collective Choice," Journal of Political Economy 1976, 84, Dec) have argued for the demand-revealing process as a means of allocating public resources. However, it is not clear that the idea is ethically justified, either abstractly or in the sense of being able to evoke widespread public support. In addition, its application has three problems: (1) it allows the budget to become imbalanced, (2) it provides an incentive to coalitions when budgets are imbalanced, & (3) it gives little incentive for individual investment of time & effort in making it work. This approach does, however, deserve testing, to see whether some conceivable means of avoiding these problems could be made to work. If demand revelation could work, it would finally allow the fulfillment of some aspect of the utilitarian program. W. H. Stoddard.

Hypothetical Contingent Valuation (CV) Surveys used to elicit values for environmental and other public goods often employ variants of the referendum mechanism due to the cognitive simplicity and familiarity of respondents with this voting format. One variant, the double referendum mechanism, requires respondents to state twice how they would vote for a given policy proposal given their cost of the good. Data from these surveys often exhibit anomalies inconsistent with standard economic models of consumer preferences. There are a number of published explanations for these anomalies, mostly focusing on problems with the second vote. This paper investigates which aspects of the hypothetical task affect the degree of non-demand revelation and takes an individual-based approach to identifying people most likely to non- demand reveal. A clear profile emerges from our model of an individual most likely to non-demand reveal as one who faces a negative surplus i.e. a net loss in the second vote and invokes non-self interested, non-financial motivations during the decision process.