On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Fred Foldvary wrote: > First of all, the outcome is not necessarily known in advance. The outcome > could be to not obtain the good. We don't know whether one will have to pay > the $100.
It doesn't matter whether he knows he has to pay or knows he doesn't or knows he has to pay with probability x. All that matters is that he views the payment as exogenous. As soon as it's exogenous, expressive preferences rule. > Even when the outcome has a high probability, one does not necessarily get > expressive benefit from agreeing with it. Suppose the issue is to spend an > extra $10 billion in enforcing the drug laws. Those who disagree with this > goal will express a value of zero. Certainly true. People can get expressive benefits from opposing a proposition rather than supporting it. Anti-abortion people get as strong of expressive benefits from registering their opposition to abortion as do pro-choice folks from supporting it. The stronger the beliefs, the higher the expressive preferences. Same for the drug laws. > If the net values are fairly close to zero, a high stated value such as $5 > million could well change the outcome. It seems to me your are setting up a > case with a predetermined outcome, whereas in fact, social choices generally > do not have such outcomes. In cases where net values will be close to zero, you're definitely right. That would cause people to scale back their bids. But, for many issues, expressive benefits are effectively unidirectional. In any case, I don't need to set up a predetermined outcome to get the result. Say, after a dozen DRP elections at the national level, the mean net value is half a billion dollars and the variance is a hundred million. Surely people could feel fairly safe in bidding several million dollars -- quite unlikely that they'd ever be decisive with that size bid. I would then predict that total amount bid increases with the number of elections held as people realize the amount they can inflate without being decisive. > Yes, but in social choice generally, is it not the case that the outcome can > be unknown? Certainly. But, so long as each voter can be reasonably sure that his vote won't be decisive, my argument holds. > > Fred Foldvary > > ===== > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
