Voting in Shareholders Meetings

Laurent Bouton (1, 2, 3) , Aniol Llorente-Saguer (4, 3) , Antonin Macé (5, 6) , Dimitrios Xefteris (7)

1 GU - Georgetown University [Washington]
2 NBER - National Bureau of Economic Research [New York]
3 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
4 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London
5 PSE - Paris School of Economics
6 PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques
7 UCY - University of Cyprus [Nicosia]

This paper studies the informational e¢ ciency of voting mechanisms in shareholder meetings. When the management cannot a¤ect the proposal being voted on, we show that voting mechanisms are more e¢ cient when their ballot space is richer. Moreover, e¢ ciency requires full divisibility of the votes. When the management has agenda power, we uncover a novel trade-o¤: more e¢ cient mechanisms provide worse incentives to select good proposals. This negative e¤ect can be large enough to wash out the higher voting e¢ ciency of even the most e¢ cient mechanisms.

Mots clés: Information Aggregation; Strategic Voting; Shareholder Meetings; Corporate Governance; One-person-one-vote; One-share-one-vote

Domaines: Economies et finances

Laurent Bouton, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Antonin Macé, Dimitrios Xefteris. Voting in Shareholders Meetings. 2022. ⟨halshs-03519689v1⟩