Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2010

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Combinatorial Voting

David Ahn, Santiago Oliveros*

Date: 2010-05-23 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm
Last modified: 2010-05-17

Abstract


We study elections with multiple issues, where voters have independent private values over bundles of issues. The innovation is considering nonseparable preferences, where issues may be complements or substitutes. Equilibrium exists when distributions over values have full support or when issues are complements. Suppose that, conditional on a voter being pivotal for a fixed issue, the outcomes of the residual issues are asymptotically certain. Then equilibrium strategies reduce to issue-by-issue voting in large elections. We characterize when large elections exhibit this reduction. With two issues, issue-by-issue voting is characterized with an inequality on the
distribution over type realizations. Finally, there exists a nonempty open set of distributions where all equilibria induce aggregate uncertainty even in the limit. Thus, contrary to the single- issue case, predictability of large elections is not a generic feature of independent private values.

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