A multistage game representation of sophisticated voting for binary procedures

Abstract

Farquharson [5] was instrumental in creating the concept of sophisticated voting, in which voters are assumed to successively eliminate dominated strategies. However, his "matrix reduction" procedure is so cumbersome that little use has been made of his insights. Here we define, for binary procedures, a multistage method of sophisticated voting which is easy to apply and intuitively understandable. Our approach allows us to prove that if a majority alternative exists, sophisticated voting leads to an outcome at least as good as and sometimes preferred to the outcome of sincere voting. Our approach yields different sophisticated strategies than Farquharson's method, but we conjecture that both approaches always yield the same outcome. © 1978.