Vodle was originally developed to perform scientific research on collective decision making by the FutureLab on Game Theory and Networks of Interacting Agents at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Our initial behavioural experiments with an early version of vodle showed that a sizeable portion of potential users prefers using a non-majoritarian, consensus-oriented decision method such as the one used in vodle over traditional majoritarian voting, even after having tried out the novel method only for about twenty minutes. It also showed that the results achieved with this way of decision making can be perceived as fairer and can lead to a higher satisfaction with the results than majoritarian methods.
In the future, vodle will continue being used in scientific research by us and other researchers, for example to study questions about...
- the value of software assistance in collective decision making
- understandability, acceptability, justifiability and perception of alternative voting systems and their results
- trade-offs between cognitive requirements and fairness and efficiency advantages of such voting systems
- the level of rationality, social value orientation, and fairness and risk perceptions in voters
- social dynamics in collective decisions with or without possibilities of delegation, such as imitation or trust
- combinations of alternative voting methods and other democratic innovations such as deliberation or sortition.
Some of these studies will require to adapt vodle to the needs of the respective experiment design, and we are happy to help with such adaptations.
If you are interested in using vodle for your own independent research or in collaborating in our research projects, please contact us!