Abstract:
Relaxing the standard assumption in collective decision-making models that voters assign equal precision to the reliability of their information, we find that information aggregation works well with voting rules other than simple majority: as voters vote less often against their information than in conventional models, they can deliver higher quality decisions, including when the number of voters grows large. We obtain richer sets of voting equilibria, than for standard collective decision-making models, with many instances, also validated experimentally, in which other non-unanimous voting rules, if not even unanimity, clearly outperform simple majority.