arXiv subjects

Dilip Ravindran

Publications and source records attributed to Dilip Ravindran.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Information aggregation with delegation of votes

Liquid democracy is a system that combines aspects of direct democracy and representative democracy by allowing voters to either vote directly themselves, or delegate their votes to others. In this paper we study the information aggregation properties of liquid democracy in a setting with heterogeneously informed truth-seeking voters -- who want the election outcome to match an underlying state of the world -- and partisan voters. We establish that liquid democracy admits equilibria which improve welfare and information aggregation over direct and representative democracy when voters' preferences and information precisions are publicly or privately known. Liquid democracy also admits equilibria which do worse than the other two systems. We discuss features of efficient and inefficient equilibria and provide conditions under which voters can more easily coordinate on the efficient equilibria in liquid democracy than the other two systems.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2022

Liquid Democracy or Direct Democracy? One Theoretical Result and Two Experiments

Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present and the electorate is finite, we show theoretically that delegation can always strictly increase the probability of a correct decision. However, delegation must be used sparingly because it reduces the information aggregated through voting. In two different experiments -- a tightly controlled lab experiment and a perceptual task run online -- we find that subjects choose very high rates of delegation, and the theoretically possible improvements fail to materialize. The experimental evidence favors Direct Democracy, whether with or without abstention. We study the perceptual task, where signals' precisions are not known, both as a test of the robustness of the lab results and as an independent methodological contribution. We argue that tests under ambiguous information are valuable and under-used tools in studying collective decision-making.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

A Better Test of Choice Overload

Choice overload - in which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's well-being - is potentially of great importance in the design of economic policy. Yet current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that existing tests are likely to be underpowered and hence that choice overload may occur more often than the literature suggests. We propose more powerful tests based on richer data and characterization theorems based on specific models, including random utility. These new approaches come with significant econometric challenges, which we show how to address. We apply our tests to new experimental data and find strong evidence of choice overload that would likely be missed using current approaches.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Competing Persuaders in Zero-Sum Games

We study Bayesian Persuasion with multiple senders who have access to conditionally independent experiments (and possibly others). Senders have zero-sum preferences over information revealed. We characterize when any set of states can be pooled in equilibrium and when all equilibria are fully revealing. The state is fully revealed in every equilibrium if and only if sender utility functions are `globally nonlinear'. With two states, this is equivalent to some sender having nontrivial preferences. The upshot is that `most' zero-sum sender preferences result in full revelation. We explore what conditions are important for competition to result in such stark information revelation.

econ.TH↗