Information Aggregation and Strategic Abstention in Large Laboratory Elections

Recent advances in voting theory have shed light on the influence of pivotality on voter choices when voters have asymmetric private information, and the implications of this for information aggregation in committees and elections. Of particular interest is the result that voters may optimally choose to vote contrary to their own private information, even in committees or elections where all voters share the same preferences (David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks 1996). A related insight is that abstention can occur even when voting is costless, as in the so-called “Swing Voter’s Curse” literature (Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer 1996). The reason is that private signals give voters information about the marginal distribution of states (given by voter signals), but what matters for an optimal decision is the distribution of states conditional on a pivotal event. For example, the pivotal event under majority rule arises when the aggregate votes of the other voters is either a tie or one vote away from a tie. These conditional distributions can be much different from the unconditional distribution of states. Because of these differences, some results are quite unintuitive and seem behaviorally implausible at first blush. Because these results have important implications about information aggregation and the efficiency of Information Aggregation and Strategic Abstention in Large Laboratory Elections