Surajeet Chakravarty and Todd Kaplan use (...) arguments to compare simple voting and shouting matches. In the latter, those who care more about the outcome put more effort into shouting. Thus, if there is a lot of variance in opinions, shouting better reflects marginal utility and yields something closer to social optimum. How is this shouting concretely expressed? It should be a signal that is costly and in some way wasteful. In France, it is demonstrating on the streets. In the United States it is donating to political campaigns. In Thailand it is erecting barricades. Usually seen as major inefficiencies, all these can actually be good.Well, some of those forms of shouting actually are major inefficiencies. Striking and rioting do play a role of costly signals and may in this way bring about outcomes closer to optimal, but they have huge negative externalities. Violent protests and strikes are costly not only to those who care about the issues, but also impose significant costs on innocent bystanders (i.e. people who do not share the protesters' preferences). Simple shouting matches proposed in Chakravarty and Kaplan's paper are much better in that respect.
Here's one curious thing though: there is a criterion for determining intensity of preferences that is much more efficient than screaming your brains out. It's willingness to pay. Why don't the writers propose a model in which voters simply bid for votes? Is it because suggesting that people pay to vote is great sacrilege against one of our sacred values, and therefore it's bad politics to submit a paper like that?
When you suggest that people bid to vote, would you envision coalitions of people bidding as one?
ReplyDeleteWell, it depends. First, I'm not suggesting this; I'm undecided on this issue. I'm just pointing out that the authors of the paper propose a model of voting by shouting which is isomorphic to a model of voting by paying, and simply wonder why they chose to write about screaming and not paying.
ReplyDeleteSo, in their model there are n voters that choose between two alternatives. Each voter chooses an alternative to shout for and the level of shouting. The voter that shouts the loudest gets to choose. That's the same thing as saying each voter chooses an alternative to buy and a price at which it is purchased, and the voter with the highest valuation gets to pick.
At the same time (unrelated to previous comment), maintaining the capacity to express oneself politically, in the US, is also a sacred value that has been codified as the ability to spend money for a particular candidate (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 2010).
ReplyDeleteThat is a very interesting observation. I'm guessing there's a clash between two sacred values: political expression and voting in a one person one vote environment. You'd like to express your commitment to certain issues, and you'd like to do it through money. The idea of buying votes strikes you as abhorrent, however, so instead you donate money to your favorite politician.
ReplyDelete