Antonin Macé

We study how do-or-die threats ending negotiations affect gridlock and welfare when two opposing parties bargain. Failure to agree on a deal in any period implies a continuation of the negotiation. However, under brinkmanship, agreement failure in any period may precipitate a crisis with a small chance. In equilibrium, such brinkmanship threats improve the probability of an agreement, but also increase the risk of crisis. Brinkmanship reduces welfare when one might think it is most needed: severe gridlock. In this case, despite this global welfare loss, a party has incentives to use brinkmanship strategically to obtain a favorable bargaining position

This paper examines the comparative properties of voting rules based on the richness of their ballot spaces, assuming a given distribution of voting rights. We focus on how well voting rules aggregate the information dispersed among voters. We consider how different voting rules affect both voters’ decisions at the voting stage and the incentives of the agenda-setter, who decides whether to put the proposal to a vote. Without agenda-setter, the voting efficiency of rules is higher when their ballot space is richer. Moreover, full-information efficiency requires full divisibility of the votes. In the presence of an agenda-setter, we uncover a novel trade-off: in some cases, rules with high voting efficiency provide worse incentives to the agenda-setter to select good proposals. This negative effect can be large enough to wash out the higher voting efficiency of even the most efficient rules.

We study how voting rules shape voter coordination in large three-candidate elections. We consider three rules, that differ on the number of candidates that voters can support: Plurality (one), Anti-Plurality (two) and Approval Voting (one or two). We show that the Condorcet winner is always elected at some equilibrium under Approval Voting, and that this rule provides better welfare guarantees than Plurality. We then numerically study a dynamic process of political tâtonnement which delivers rich insights. The Condorcet winner is virtually always elected under Approval Voting, but not under the other rules. The dominance of Approval Voting is robust to several alternative welfare criteria and the introduction of expressive voters.

We propose a general model of repeated voting in committees and study equilibrium behavior under alternative majority rules. We find that repetition may significantly increase the efficiency of majority voting through a mechanism of intertemporal logrolling, agents sometimes voting against their immediate preference to benefit the group’s long-term interest. In turn, this affects the comparison of majority rules, which may differ significantly relative to the static setting. The model provides a rationale for the use of super-majority rules, while accounting for the prevalence of consensus in committee voting.