Bargaining in Committees of Representatives

Abstract

Committees are often made up of representatives, each of them acting on behalf of a group of individuals or constituency of different size, who make decisions by means of a voting rule which specifies what vote configurations in the committee can pass a decision. This raises the question of the choice of an `adequate' (in a sense to be specified) voting rule, given the different sizes of the groups that members represent. In this article we take a new departure to address this problem, assuming that the committee is a bargaining scenario in which negotiations take place `in the shadow of the voting rule' in search of consensus. That is, a general agreement is sought, but any winning coalition can enforce an agreement. In this context, the notion of a `neutral' voting rule, based on the compromise between equitableness and efficiency (or egalitarianism and utilitarianism) represented by the Nash bargaining solution, is founded, yielding a recommendation that differs from previous ones.