Voting Isn’t Rational; Is Digging?
9 August 2006 at 1:10 pm Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
Teppo Felin, reflecting on Wikipedia, notes that the entries in his own area of expertise are weak, but that he doesn’t bother to correct them — “as a firm believer in the ‘market,’ I am sure it will provide.” I feel the same way. Unless my knowledge is highly idiosyncratic, it is likely that someone else will make the necessary improvements before too long. Why contribute when you can free ride?
The same applies, a fortiori, to Digg.com, a hot new service that allows readers to vote on their favorite news items (from mainstream media outlets, alternative sources, blogs, or whatever) and lists them in descending order of popularity. My friend Stephen Carson urges libertarian subversives like myself to Digg our favorite stories and push them to the top. But the top articles on Digg.com typically have several hundred votes per day; on the margin, will my vote make a difference?
Of course, this is simply an application of the paradox of voting. The following remarks appear on the personal section of my official website:
Many of my colleagues — even economists who should know better — seem baffled that I don’t vote. They are apparently unaware of the many good arguments, both pragmatic and moral, against voting, particularly in national elections.
I think Tyler Cowen gets it right: “Overall I view voting as a selfish act, usually done for purposes of self-image…. I fondly recall Gordon Tullock’s point: ‘The paradox is not why people vote, but why everyone doesn’t vote for himself.’ “
The Freakonomics team summarizes some recent research on why many people do, in fact, vote.
This sort of paradox is sometimes applied to open-source software, but I don’t think the analogy holds. As Lerner and Tirole, Maurer and Scotchmer, and others demonstrate, open-source programmers typically do benefit, personally, from participation in open-source projects by signaling their abilities to the market, abilities that are eventually rewarded with higher earnings. I suppose the same could be true for Wikipedia contributors, but I’m not sure.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Institutions.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Eric H | 10 August 2006 at 11:36 am
One reason for editing wiki is that some important areas are a matter of opinion, and whoever does the best job of presenting their side gets to dominate a potentially influential source of “authoritativeness”. Do you really want to free ride when you don’t know where the bus is going, especially if someone with whom you strongly disagree may be trying to get in the driver’s seat?
The difference between voting and editing is that 1 vote more or less may not matter, but one really good edit may. Just try to figure out where Hayek’s ideas on National Socialism are located in Wiki: the socialists have dominated that debate and managed to keep them out of any articles about Nazis. Anyone trying to find out about the subject in that supposedly neutral reference will not be able to find ithe information in the relevant place.