38,820 research outputs found
Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting.
Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules
that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent
may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up
the votes and choosing the top- candidates receiving the most votes. An
agent may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way
that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain
situations, agents may use heuristics to strategize, instead of incurring the
additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them.
In this paper, we examine voting behavior in multi-winner approval voting
scenarios with complete information. We show that people generally manipulate
their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal
manipulation. Instead, voters tend to prioritize the candidates with the
highest utilities. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these
heuristics in situations where agents only have access to partial information
Polling bias and undecided voter allocations: US Presidential elections, 2004 - 2016
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for
predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify
the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to
each candidate in a simple, deterministic manner. Historically this may have
been adequate because the undecided were comparatively small enough to assume
that they do not affect the relative proportions of the decided voters.
However, in the presence of high numbers of undecided voters, these static
rules may in fact bias election predictions from election poll authors and
meta-poll analysts. In this paper, we examine the effect of undecided voters in
the 2016 US presidential election to the previous three presidential elections.
We show there were a relatively high number of undecided voters over the
campaign and on election day, and that the allocation of undecided voters in
this election was not consistent with two-party proportional (or even)
allocations. We find evidence that static allocation regimes are inadequate for
election prediction models and that probabilistic allocations may be superior.
We also estimate the bias attributable to polling agencies, often referred to
as "house effects".Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, 6 table
Lending Cycles and Real Outcomes: Costs of Political Misalignment. LEQS Paper No. 139/2018 December 2018
We document a strong political cycle in bank credit and industry outcomes in Turkey.
In line with theories of tactical redistribution, state-owned banks systematically adjust
their lending around local elections compared with private banks in the same province
based on electoral competition and political alignment of incumbent mayors. This
effect only exists in corporate lending as opposed to consumer loans. It creates credit
constraints for firms in opposition areas, which suffer drops in employment and sales
but not firm entry. There is substantial misallocation of financial resources as
provinces and industries with high initial efficiency suffer the greatest constraints
Political budget cycles in the European Union and the impact of political pressures: a dynamic panel regression analysis
This paper investigates the presence of political budget cycles (PBCs) in the European Union using a data set encompassing all 27 current member states over the period 1997-2008, and analyzes what may explain their variability across countries and over time. Conditioning on partisan considerations and several socio-economic variables, we find evidence in favor of a systematic electoral cycle in fiscal policy (i.e. spending and budget deficits are raised in election years). Furthermore, we find that PBCs are much larger in the Eurozone countries than in the countries that have not yet adopted the euro. Finally, we discuss an interesting area for future research, namely, fiscal policy manipulations are influenced by the information available to the market before elections. Specifically, we show that the size of PBCs is inversely proportional to the relative weight voters assign to non-economic issues prior to an election and positively correlated with the uncertainty over the electoral outcome. Once we account for these two features, the aforementioned differences between the Eurozone and the non-Eurozone countries seem to disappear
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