We examine how democratic mechanisms can yield socially desirable outcomes in the presence of uncertainty about an underlying state of nature. We depart from a conventional mechanism design approach because we aim for democratic mechanisms to reflect some basic properties of decision-making in democracies. In particular, actual decisions are made by majority voting. The proposals to be voted upon are made by a selfish agenda-setter. Moreover, communication is limited to a binary message space (that is, voting Yes or No). We show how suitable democratic mechanisms can resolve uncertainty, reveal the state of nature, and implement the Condorcet winner. We demonstrate that this implementation result requires (at most) two voting stages regardless of the number of states or the number of alternatives. We also show that implementation requires a conditional privilege for a small representative subset of the population.

中文翻译：

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民主机制中的信息共享

我们研究民主机制如何在潜在自然状态存在不确定性的情况下产生社会理想的结果。我们与传统的机制设计方法不同，因为我们的目标是让民主机制反映民主国家决策的一些基本属性。特别是，实际决定是通过多数投票做出的。要投票的提案是由一个自私的议程制定者提出的。此外，通信仅限于二进制消息空间（即投票是或否）。我们展示了合适的民主机制如何解决不确定性、揭示自然状态并实施孔多塞获胜者。我们证明了这个实施结果需要（最多）两个投票阶段，而不管状态的数量或替代方案的数量。