Vote trading is ubiquitous in committees and legislatures, and yet we know very little about
its properties. We explore this subject with a laboratory experiment. We propose a model of
vote trading in which pairs of voters exchange votes whenever doing so is mutually
advantageous. The resulting trading dynamics always converge to stable vote allocations–
allocations where no further improving trades exist. The data show that stability has
predictive power: vote allocations in the lab converge towards stable allocations, and …