Balancing the Power to Appoint Officers

Rules of k names are frequently used methods to appoint individuals to office. They are two-stage procedures where a first set of agents, the proposers, select k individuals from an initial set of candidates, and then another agent, the chooser, appoints one among those k in the list. In practice, the list of k names is often arrived at by letting each of the proposers screen the proposed candidates by voting for v of them and then choose those k with the highest support. We then speak of v-rules of k names. Our main purpose in this paper is to study how different choices of the parameters v and k affect the balance of power between the proposers and the choosers. From a positive point of view, we analyze a strategic game where the proposers interact to determine what list of candidates to submit. From a normative point of view, we study the performance of different rules in expected terms, under different informational assumptions. The choice of v and k is then analyzed from the perspectives of efficiency, fairness and compromise.