"The Wisdom of the crowd: uniformed voting and the efficiency of democracy"

(Ralph-Cristopher Bayer, Marco Faravelli, Carlos Pimenta)

We show in a novel voting model with costly information acquisition that in equilibrium nobody votes without acquiring information and that the probability of the better alternative winning converges to one as the size of the electorate approaches in-finity. In a large-scale internet experiment during the US Presidential Election, we find alarming rates of uninformed voting (>42 percent). The problem is exacerbated in treat-ments that allow for expressive voting motives and overconfidence (rates up to 56 per-cent). Increasing the electorate size substantially raises efficiency, as long as uninformed voting is not too biased towards one alternative.