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Voting experiments : measuring vulnerability of voting procedures to manipulation

Publication at Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education |
2011

Abstract

A minimal reduction in strategic voter's knowledge about other voters' voting patterns severely limits her ability to strategically manipulate the voting outcome. In this paper I relax the implicit assumption made in the Gibbard-Satterthwaite's impossibility theorem about strategic voter's complete information about all other voters' preference profiles.

Via a series of computation-based simulations I find that vulnerability to strategic voting is decreasing in the number of voters and increasing in the number of alternatives. Least vulnerable voting procedures are Condorcet-consistent procedures, followed by elimination procedures, while most prone to manipulation are the simplest rules.

Strategic voting is vulnerable both to an absolute and relative reduction in amount of information.