On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Fred Foldvary wrote: > Since the relevant comparitive system is majority voting, there is a disjoint > in yes-no voting as well.
Agree with you so far > The disjoint is even greater, since with demand > revelation, each person pays the average cost, whereas with voting, the cost > is paid from arbitrary taxation. We need to fold in the revenue aspect. > If the majority voting is tied to a head tax, then there is still a disjoint, > because given cost C/N, the a person votes yes if his value is > C/N, but > this does not reflect the intensity of his desire. Why are we assuming that instituting the demand revealing process would get us to uniform average-cost taxation? > But it can be questionned whether the probability is known. > In the pure case, we don't know at all what values other will state. > If probabilities are known, how do we know them? The method of knowing has > to be included. If it is known by fiat, this injects the outcome in advance. Tullock speculates in the article that the total amount taxed through the demand revealing process would be quite low, which implies that the probability of being decisive will also be quite low. In any case, after a few such elections, it seems likely that the total amounts bid and the total amounts collected would be public knowledge, and if the total amount collected were indeed a very small fraction of the total amount bid, people would rightly conclude that the probability of decisiveness is low. Additionally, many issues enjoy reasonably broad public support. For any such issues, it would be a rather safe bet to assume that one's dollar vote wouldn't be decisive. > This presumes (1) the ballots are not secret or else that they are secret and > people express the truth, (2) probabilities of paying the social cost (Clarke > tax) are known, (3) the utility derived from expression and wining does not > count. 1) neither is necessarily assumed. All expressive benefit could simply be internal to the voter: the voter expressing to himself what kind of person he is. Expressive voting in that case helps build self-image. But, we currently do have a secret ballot, and expressive preferences still reign. 2) They need not be known with certainty. They just have to be known to be relatively low. 3) Not true. Those benefits just have to be lower than social cost to get an inefficient outcome. > > Fred Foldvary > > ===== > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >
