Inducing Cooperation through Weighted Voting and Veto Power
Journal: SPIRE - Sciences Po Institutional REpository
Year: 2018

We study the design of voting rules for committees representing heterogeneous groups (countries, states, districts) when cooperation among groups is voluntary. While efficiency recommends weighting groups proportionally to their stakes, we show that accounting for participation constraints entails overweighting some groups, those for which the incentive to cooperate is the lowest. When collective decisions are not enforceable, cooperation induces more stringent constraints that may require grant