Policy-motivated candidates, noisy platforms, and non-robustness
Abstract: "A model of a two-candidate election is developed in which the candidates are mainly office-motivated but also to some arbitrarily small extent policy-motivated, and their chosen platforms are to some arbitrarily small extent noisy. The...
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Abstract: "A model of a two-candidate election is developed in which the candidates are mainly office-motivated but also to some arbitrarily small extent policy-motivated, and their chosen platforms are to some arbitrarily small extent noisy. The platforms' being noisy means that if a candidate has chosen a particular platform, the voters' perception is that she has, with positive probability, actually chosen some other platform. It is shown that (1) an equilibrium in which the candidates play pure exists whether or not there is a Condorcet winner among the policy alternatives, and (2) in this equilibrium the candidates choose their ideal points, which means that the platforms do not converge." (author's abstract)
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Inverse campaigning
Abstract: "It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A's policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are...
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Abstract: "It can be advantageous for an office motivated party A to spend effort to make it public that a group of voters will lose from party A's policy proposal. Such effort is called inverse campaigning. The inverse campaigning equilibria are described for the case where the two parties can simultaneously reveal information publicly to uninformed voters. Inverse campaigning dissipates the parties' rents and causes some inefficiency in expectation. Inverse campaigning also influences policy design. Successful policy proposals hurt small groups of voters who lose much and do not benefit small groups of voters who win much." (author's abstract)
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Hiding information in electoral competition
Abstract: "We model a two-candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy-relevant state of the world. The candidates receive private signals about the true state, which are imperfectly correlated. We study whether the...
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Abstract: "We model a two-candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy-relevant state of the world. The candidates receive private signals about the true state, which are imperfectly correlated. We study whether the candidates are able to credibly communicate their information to voters through their choice of policy platforms. Our results show that the fact that private information is dispersed between the candidates creates a strong incentive for them to bias their messages toward the electorate's prior. Information transmission becomes more difficult, the more the information is dispersed between the candidates and the stronger is the electorate's prior. Indeed, as more prior information becomes available, welfare can decrease." (author's abstract)
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