Theoretical Economics Letters > Vol.4 No.8, October 2014

Esther Mata-Pérez¹, Annick Laruelle^2,3, Ricardo Martínez⁴, Giovanni Ponti^1,5

¹Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain.
²Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis EconómicoI, Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), Bilbao, Spain.
³IKERBASQUE—Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
⁴Departamento de Economía y Estadística, Universidad de León, León, Spain.
⁵Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, LUISS Guido Carli, Roma, Italy.

We report a laboratory experiment on strategic manipulation in positional rules, by which individuals are asked to elicit a complete ranking over 3 alternatives. The prominent rule in this set is the so-called Borda Count, but our experiment also considers other rules in which we increase the score associated to the second-best candidate and vary the monetary prizes in case of a victory of the latter (“preference intensity”). Our results suggest that, as standard game-theoretic logic would suggest, when the intermediate scores and prizes increase, strategic manipulation is reduced. We also see that group size affects the likelihood of strategic manipulation in a non-linear fashion, and mostly depends on how the intermediate score is manipulated. Furthermore, rule efficiency increases with group size (i.e., as the probability of being pivotal decreases) and with both the intermediate scores and prizes.

Strategic Manipulation, Borda Count, Positional Voting, Experimental Economics

Mata-Pérez, E. , Laruelle, A. , Martínez, R. and Ponti, G. (2014) Preference Intensity in Positional Voting. Theoretical Economics Letters, 4, 727-738. doi: 10.4236/tel.2014.48092.