Voting by veto and the role of the compromise function

This paper analyzes voting by veto procedures in the context of a pure sharing problem. It is shown that the direct intuition about these voting mechanisms fails: the veto power of the players does not by itself make players act in an equitable manner. If the compromise function yields a constant compromise alternative, then it plays the role of a threat point and the behavior of the players in making proposals tends to be selfish. However, if it depends on the individual proposals, and selects a real compromise among them, then egalitarian proposals can be achieved as the unique subgame perfect equilibria with symmetric proposals of the game. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.