We study strategic voting after weakening the notion of strategy-proofness to Ordinal Bayesian Incentive Compatibility (OBIC). Under OBIC, truth-telling is required to maximize the expected utility of every voter, expected utility being computed with respect to the voter's prior beliefs and under the assumption that everybody else is also telling the truth. We show that for a special type of priors, i.e., the uniform priors, there exists a large class of social choice functions that are OBIC. However, for priors that are generic in the set of independent beliefs, a social choice function is OBIC only if it is dictatorial. This result underlines the robustness of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem. Copyright The Econometric Society 2004.

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We analyze a psychologically based model of voter turnout. Potential voters experience regret if they fail to vote, which is the motivation for participation in voting. Regret from abstention is inversely related to the margin of victory. Voters on the winner's side experience less regret than those on the loser's side. We show that the unique equilibrium involves positive voter turnout. We show that the losing side has higher turnout. In addition, voter turnout is positively related to importance of the election and the competitiveness of the election. We also consider scenarios in which voters are uncertain about the composition of the electorate's political preferences and show similar phenomena emerge. Copyright � 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..

We study the consequences of positive correlation of beliefs in the design of voting rules in a model with an arbitrary number of voters. We propose a notion of positive correlation, based on the likelihood of agreement of the k‐best alternatives (for any k) of two orders called top‐set (TS) correlation. We characterize the set of ordinal Bayesian incentive compatible (OBIC) (d'Aspremont and Peleg 1988) voting rules with TS‐correlated beliefs and additionally satisfy robustness with respect to local perturbations. We provide an example of a voting rule that satisfies OBIC with respect to all TS‐correlated beliefs. The generally positive results contrast sharply with the negative results obtained for the independent case by [Majumdar and Sen, 2004] and parallel similar results in the auction design model (Crémer and McLean 1988).