Free-Riding in Multi-Issue Decisions

Abstract

Voting in multi-issue domains allows for compromise outcomes that satisfy all voters to some extent, but such fairness considerations open the possibility of a special form of manipulation: free-riding, where voters untruthfully oppose a popular opinion in one issue to receive increased consideration in other issues; we study under which conditions this is possible and show that even weak fairness considerations enable free-riding, and through computational and experimental analysis, we find that while free-riding in multi-issue domains is often possible, it comes at a non-negligible individual risk for voters, making its allure smaller than one could intuitively assume.