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TOPIC:
INTERIM STRATEGY-PROOFNESS WITH AN APPLICATION TO VOTING
ABSTRACT
We study voting mechanisms in a setting where there are two alternatives, the agents’ preferences are interdependent, and the underlying type space is rich. The focus is on three incentive compatibility conditions that each captures a notion of robustness. First, we show that strategy-proofness (SP) is restrictive, as typically it permits nothing but constant mechanisms. Ex post incentive compatibility (EPIC), which is a weakening of SP, is more lenient, but only so in finite type spaces — when the type space is continuous, non-constant mechanisms are again ruled out under weak conditions. In view of this, we propose an alternative weakening of SP: interim strategy-proofness (ISP). ISP requires that every agent has a weakly dominant strategy conditional on her private information. We show that nontrivial ISP choice rules always exist, and moreover they are robustly implementable in a parsimonious mechanism.