Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/70142 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
Jena Economic Research Papers No. 2012,045
Publisher: 
Friedrich Schiller University Jena and Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
electoral systems
simple games
weighted voting games
square root rule
Penrose limit theorem
Penrose-Banzhaf index
institutional design
JEL: 
C61
C71
D02
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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