- A-Z
- Jena Economics Rese...
- Volume 6
- Heuristic and exact...
- Autor(in)
- Erschienen
- 23. Juli 2012
- Nummer des Discussion-Papers
-
2012-045
- Schlagwort(e)
-
electoral systems
institutional design
Penrose-Banzhaf index
Penrose limit theorem
simple games
square root rule
weighted voting games
- Zusammenfsg.
-
Power indices are mappings that quantify the influence of the members of a voting body on collective decisions a priori. Their nonlinearity and discontinuity makes it difficult to compute inverse images, i.e., to determine a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible to a desired one. The paper considers approximations to this inverse problem for the Penrose-Banzhaf index by hill-climbing algorithms and exact solutions which are obtained by enumeration and integer linear programming techniques. They are compared to the results of three simple solution heuristics. The heuristics perform well in absolute terms but can be improved upon very considerably in relative terms. The findings complement known asymptotic results for large voting bodies and may improve termination criteria for local search algorithms.
- article pub. typess JER
- Research article
- article languages JER
- Englisch
- JEL-Classification for JER
- C61 - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis ; C71 - Cooperative Games ; D02 - Institutions: Design, Formation, and Operations
- URN
- urn:nbn:de:urmel-0164d3bb-a9ef-4027-afe6-a6cd8e3b05008-00224970-13