On the advantages and disadvantages of being the first mover under rules of k names

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijet.12138
• Author: Danilo Coelho,Salvador Barberà
• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018

doi: 10.1111/ijet.12138

On the advantages and disadvantages of being the first mover

under rules of knames

Salvador Barber`

a∗and Danilo Coelho†

Rules of knames are methods that allow two potentially conflicting parties to share the power

to appoint officers. One of the parties (the proposer) selects kcandidates from a larger pool,

and then the other party (the chooser) selects the winner from this restricted list. Weinvestigate

conditions under which the two parties could agree ex ante on the distributions of roles, one of

them preferring to be the chooser and the other preferring to be the proposer.We show that this

may not always be possible, and discuss what arethe relevant characteristics of the environments

where agreement can be reached.

Key wor ds voting rule, constitutional design, strong Nash equilibrium, rule of knames

JEL classification D02, D71, D72

Accepted 9 June2017

1 Introduction

In many social instances, two parties with potentially conflicting interests must come to agreement

regarding a decision that affects both of them. A paradigmatic example is the cutting of a cake that can

be divided in infinite ways. But a lot of social decisions involvethe choice of indivisibles: in particular,

the social decision may involve choosing one individual froma set of potential candidates. Different

methods have been proposed in this setting with indivisibilities allowing each of the parties to have

some partial say on the final outcome and to achieve some sort of compromise between them.

One family of such methods, which are reminiscentof the divide and choose procedure, are those

that we have called in previous work rules of knames (Barber`

a and Coelho 2010, 2017), where the

aim is to choose one out of ccandidates (1 ≤k≤c). They work as follows: one of the parties is

allowed to select kcandidates out of the cavailable, and then the other party chooses one winner

from those selected by the opponent. Rulesof that kind have been used for centuries, and are still very

much resorted to in many countries to adopt different types of decisions. Already at the beginning

of the sixth century bc, the clergy and the chief of the citizens of some eastern European countries

were entitled to choose three names from which the archbishop could select the bishop. The use

of rules of knames was widespread within the Roman Church from the early Middle Ages, when

∗MOVE, UABand Barcelona GSE , Barcelona, Spain. Email: salvador.barbera@uab.cat

†IPEA, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Salvador Barber`

a acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through

the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centers of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563) and grant ECO2014-53051-P, and

from the Generalitat de Catalunya, through grant SGR2014-0515. Danilo Coelho acknowledges financial support from

the Brazilian Ministry of Science Technology and Innovation, through a CNPq ResearchProductivity Scholarship. We

thank Anke Gerber for useful comments.

International Journal of Economic Theory 14 (2018) 51–60 © IAET 51

International Journal of Economic Theory