Seminar

Past

On the veil-of-ignorance principle: Welfare-optimal information disclosure in voting

Karine Van der Straeten

  • Date17 November 2022
  • Time 11h15 - 12h00
  • Room Auditorium 3

Abstract

Voters' voting decisions crucially depend on their information. Thus, it is an important question how much / what kind of information they should know, as a normative guidance of the optimal extent of transparency. We consider a simple two-alternative majority voting environment, and study the optimal information disclosure policy by a utilitarian social planner. Although full transparency is sometimes (informally) argued as ideal, we show that full transparency is often strictly suboptimal. This is basically because of the well-known potential mismatch between what a majority wants and what is socially optimal. Under certain conditions, in order to alleviate this mismatch, the optimal policy discloses just the ``anonymized'' information about the value of the alternatives to the voters, placing them effectively behind a partial ``veil of ignorance''.

Other seminars

Signal Extraction in Hiring: Evidence from Teacher Recruiting

  • Seminar

  • TSE internal seminars

  • Date 9 October 2026

  • Place A3 Jean-Jacques Laffont

  • Speaker or organiser Matteo Bobba

Details

Two Wrongs Can Sometimes Make a Right: The Environmental Benefits of Market Power in the Oil Sector

  • Seminar

  • TSE internal seminars

  • Date 9 October 2026

  • Place A3 Jean-Jacques Laffont

  • Speaker or organiser Charlotte De Cannière

Details

AI in Cybersecurity: an Equilibrium Approach

  • Seminar

  • TSE internal seminars

  • Date 9 October 2026

  • Place A3 Jean-Jacques Laffont

  • Speaker or organiser Alexandre de Cornière

Details