Abstract
Vote trading is ubiquitous in committees and legislatures, and yet we know very little about its properties. We explore this subject with a laboratory experiment. We propose a model of vote trading in which pairs of voters exchange votes whenever doing so is mutually advantageous. The resulting trading dynamics always converge to stable vote allocations–allocations where no further improving trades exist. The data show that stability has predictive power: vote allocations in the lab converge towards stable allocations, and individual vote holdings at the end of trading are in line with theoretical predictions. There is less support for the finer details of the trade-by-trade dynamics.
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