First-mover advantage is a concept seen in business schools. Sometimes, the first firm to enter a particular segment of the market accumulates a large name recognition and market share, and out-competes newcomers. However, there are obvious disadvantages to moving first: subsequent firms can save on research and development and on marketing costs by exploiting the work done by the first mover.  If it is relatively easy to imitate other firms, and the first mover does not gain important knowledge with its extra experience, the pioneering firm may be overtaken.

In the “marketplace of ideas”, the barrier to entry by imitators and followers, is low, by design. The first person to discover a new idea in science is often not the person who is most associated by the public with that idea  (this observation is called Stigler’s law ). Although there are plenty of examples where well-known scientists got credit for the work of others, thus becoming even more famous (the Matthew effect ), new and improved ideas do break through very often – because over 5 million papers are published per year, this is not surprising. Even if the wrong people get the credit, in some sense, the overall system still functions fairly well.

However, one situation in which  first-mover disadvantage occurs, and the consequences are borne by more than just the inventor, is when an agreed standard must be designed for a society, and changing it is hard. Such questions as whether we should drive on the left or right side of the road cannot be left up to individuals. In this case, the choice is basically arbitrary, and eventually whole continents and islands adopt the same side (the switch from left to right by Sweden in 1967 was quite late, and worth reading about). Sometimes, making a choice early can lock us into a suboptimal situation.

Another example is the voltage for consumer electricity supply. After the War of the Currents (as an aside, the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison is interesting) was settled in favor of AC power, the question of what residential voltage to use still remained. In the USA and Canada, which were at the forefront of development, 110V was decided on. Once the decision is made, changing it would be very difficult. Many other countries, making the decision later, ended up using 240V, which is more efficient in terms of power losses (interestingly, these are not the only voltages used worldwide but the US is near the low end).

A more relevant example for this series is the design of the electoral system. Although some choices were made as a result of compromises and were probably known not to be good at the time, the United States Constitution is, overall, a very impressive piece of work. The designers knew what they didn’t want (tyrannical and capricious monarchs), but had very little precedent to follow.  They were not seeking timeless perfection. Thomas Jefferson  clearly believed that laws, including the Constitution, should be amended often (as a rule of thumb, every 19 years!). Nevertheless, the procedure for amending major laws is, and ought to be, fairly difficult. There have been 33 amendments proposed to the original US Constitution. Of these, 27 have been ratified but many were done (including the Bill of Rights, which constitutes the first ten amendments) within the first few years, and none proposed after 1971 has so far been ratified. The list of unratified amendments includes some interesting ones, including one to prohibit child labor, one to strip US citizenship from anyone who accepts a title of nobility, and the famous Equal Rights (for women) Amendment.

Article I of the Constitution already specifies that elections for the House of Representatives be held every 2 years (which is very short by world standards – in fact it seems only Micronesia has such a short term, while 4 or 5 years are far more common) and that senatorial terms should be 6 years. It also gives the states broad rights to conduct elections. Article II discusses the Electoral College (which will be the subject of another post). Several amendments have been passed to loosen the rules for eligibility of voters and restrict them for candidates, but to my knowledge there is no more discussion about elections in the Constitution.

Given the historical period, the size of the country and the experience of the architects of the US government, it makes sense that they would think of voting as synonymous with dividing each state into geographical districts and electing a single member by plurality (each voter votes for one candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the most votes – of course, some form of tiebreaking method is needed). However, although this has been the most common method, some states did it differently. For example, New Mexico had two representatives for several decades, elected from a single statewide district. The Apportionment Act of 1911 required states to use single-member geographic districts of nearly equal population, but this expired and “at-large” voting was again legal from 1929, as was using districts of wildly different sizes. Finally in 1967 Congress passed a law restoring the 1911 rules. An important stated reason was to ensure that racial minorities had some chance of representation, and that other minorities, for example rural voters, did not have excessive influence.

It seems obvious now that this action  “threw the baby out with the bathwater”. It would have required some effort to craft a law that ruled out undesirable outcomes without being so prescriptive, but it seems a great shame that the effort was not made, or has not been made since. Many other countries have elected multiple members from districts (for example using some form of proportional representation or single transferable vote) in a way that seems to be broadly popular and allows for minority interests to have their proper weight. The United States, in addition to having first-mover disadvantage in some areas, also seems to have a strong inertia (how many serious countries still use currency as impractical as the one cent coin or dollar bill?). Yet the federated nature of the country allows for experiments in the states. Why so few have been made or allowed is something of a mystery to me.