A Study of Vote Weighting in Voting Theory An Experimental Economics Approach

Document Type : a

Authors

1 دانشیار گروه اقتصاد، دانشگاه اصفهان

2 دانشیار‌ گروه اقتصاد، دانشگاه اصفهان

3 دکترای اقتصاد و مدرس دانشگاه

Abstract

An unequal distribution of money or other resources of wealth as one of the important aspects of ­the market mechanism, leads to the optimal resource allocation in the market system. The main question of this article is whether it is possible to design a mechanism for citizen participation in the political market (the voting) in a way that their votes be unequally distributed based on their capabilities and optimality is achieved at the same time. In the framework of votes weighting of the past US presidential elections and through an experimental survey, by designing and distributing a questionnaire in eleven universities of Iran, this research seeks to answer to that question. The results show that in the case of the votes weighting based on educational level -as an index of human capital- in U.S presidential elections of 2000, Al Gore with 277 of the 538 electoral votes vs. George Bush’s 271, would have won the election, we examined the effect of the cross-sectional vote weighting in rating five European universities by the students of the eleven universities. The results show that the cross-sectional vote weighting in six out of eleven universities, increases efficiency. Additionally, in the total voting of the eleven universities vote weighting causes higher efficiency regarding the proposed model.


Keywords


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