Experimental analysis of Bayesian voting mechanisms, procedural choices and the acceptance of transfers (A07)

• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 139943784

Decisions about political reforms are governed by many different rules. This project experimentally evaluates the performance of various decision-making rules and the selection of rules. Specifically, we experimentally analyze the political behavior of individuals who have private information about how they expect policies to affect their well-being. We experimentally investigate individual choices in Bayesian games in which players hold private information and know only about the distribution of other players’ information. Our focus is on institutional innovations that potentially increase the efficiency of the resulting social choice. These innovations include two-stage voting procedures, the bundling of decisions, the use of compensation payments, and hybrid decision procedures that use votes and transfers. During the third funding period, the project also experimentally investigated the possibility to buy welfare-enhancing reforms from two or more veto players.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 884: Political Economy of Reforms
• Applicant Institution: Universität Mannheim
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Dirk Engelmann, until 11/2014; Professor Dr. Hans-Peter Grüner; Duk Gyoo Kim, Ph.D., since 1/2018