Van Der Straeten, Karine and Yamashita, Takuro (2025) On the veil-of-ignorance principle : welfare-optimal information disclosure in Voting. TSE Working Paper, n. 23-1463, Toulouse

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Abstract

We consider a two-alternative (reform vs status quo) voting en-
vironment. A benevolent utilitarian social planner controls both the
information pertaining to a payoff-relevant state of the world and the
voting rule. We characterize the voting rule and the information dis-
closure policy that are jointly socially optimal. Although full trans-
parency is sometimes (informally) argued as ideal, we show that full
transparency is strictly suboptimal. The optimal policy discloses just
the “anonymized” information about the value of the alternatives and
the optimal voting rule is a qualified majority rule that becomes more
lenient as the “anonymized” value of the reform (compared to the
status quo) increases.