Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society

We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents’ cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous – the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference intensities outperform any ordinal mechanism.