Essays in political economy

This thesis is comprised of three chapters. In the first chapter, I examine a voting model where two political parties have fixed positions on a unidimensional policy space but where the implemented policy is the convex combination of the two positions and study the effects of opinion polls on election results and social welfare. Voters are completely agnostic about the distribution of preferences and gain sequential and partial information through series of opinion polls. Voters' behavior is driven in part by regret minimization. The mass of undecided voters decreases monotonically with the number of polls, but may not necessarily disappear. Voters who remain undecided have centrist ideologies. Finally, social welfare is not necessarily increasing in the number of polls: having more polls is not always better. Features of the model are con firmed by empirical evidence. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz, we evaluate the effect of an institutional provision designed to increase accountability of local officials, and we show that its implementation can lead to a distribution of power within the legislature which is not consistent with voters' true preferences. The cause of this inconsistency is the ballot design which asymmetrically affects the officials listed on it. We analyze the case of the Lima's 2013 city legislature recall referendum and show that the design of the referendum ballot had adverse and signifficant effects on the composition of the Lima's city legislature. We also show that the election results with more \neutral" ballot designs would have been signifficantly different, and the composition of the legislature would have been more representative of voters' true preferences. More specifically, we use our results to simulate the outcome of the election with a random order of candidates. Even though the voters' fatigue is still present, it affects all parties equally, obtaining a more faithful representation of the voters' preferences. Finally, the third chapter is a joint work with Marco Serena. For small electorates, the probability of casting the pivotal vote drives one's willingness to vote, however the existence of costs of voting incentivizes ones abstention. In two-alternative pivotal-voter models, this trade-off has been extensively studied under private information on the cost of voting. We complement the literature by providing an analysis under complete information, extending the analysis of Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]. If the cost of voting is sufficiently high at least for supporters of one of the two alternatives, the equilibrium is unique, and fully characterized. If instead the cost of voting is sufficiently low for everyone, we characterize three classes of equilibria and we find that all equilibria must belong to one of these three classes, regardless of the number of individuals. Furthermore we focus on equilibria which are continuous in the cost of voting. We show that this equilibrium refinement pins down a unique equilibrium. We conclude by discussing an application of our findings to redistribution of wealth.Polling in a Proportional Representation System / Christos Mavridis. -- The last shall be the first: failed accountability due to voters fatigue and ballot design / Christos Mavridis, Agustin Casas and Guillermo Diaz. -- Costly voting under complete information / Christos Mavridis, Marco SerenaPrograma Oficial de Doctorado en EconomíaPresidente: Pablo Amorós González; Secretario: Fracisco Marhuenda Hurtado; Vocal: Orestis Troumpouni

The atmospheric effects of stratospheric aircraft: A current consensus

In the early 1970's, a fleet of supersonic aircraft flying in the lower stratosphere was proposed. A large fleet was never built for economic, political, and environmental reasons. Technological improvements may make it economically feasible to develop supersonic aircraft for current markets. Some key results of earlier scientific programs designed to assess the impact of aircraft emissions on stratospheric ozone are reviewed, and factors that must be considered to assess the environmental impact of aircraft exhaust are discussed. These include the amount of nitrogen oxides injected in the stratosphere, horizontal transport, and stratosphere/troposphere assessment models are presented. Areas in which improvements in scientific understanding and model representation must be made to reduce the uncertainty in model calculations are identified

The Parthenon, October 1, 2013

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

The Parthenon, April 11, 2012

The Parthenon, Marshall University’s student newspaper, is published by students Monday through Friday during the regular semester and weekly Thursday during the summer. The editorial staff is responsible for the news and the editorial content

Cryptanalysis of a Universally Verifiable Efficient Re-encryption Mixnet

We study the heuristically secure mix-net proposed by Puiggalí and Guasch (EVOTE 2010). We present practical attacks on both correctness and privacy for some sets of parameters of the scheme. Although our attacks only allow us to replace a few inputs, or to break the privacy of a few voters, this shows that the scheme can not be proven secure

A Publicly-Veriable Mix-net with Everlasting Privacy Towards Observers

In this paper we present a novel, publicly verifiable mixing scheme which has everlasting privacy towards observers: all the information published on the bulletin board by the mixes (audit information etc) reveals no information about the identity of any of the messages published. The correctness of the mixing process is statistical: even if all authorities conspire, they cannot change the contents of any message without being detected with overwhelming probability. We accomplish this by encoding the messages submitted using so-called Pedersen commitments. Decoding (opening) these is possible because we create a parallel mix-net run by the same mixes to which the public has no access. This private mix-net uses the same permutations as the public one, but uses homomorphic encryption, which is used to send auxiliary information (messages, decommitment values) through the mix-net to allow decoding

I read it on reddit: Exploring the role of online communities in the 2016 US elections news cycle

Reddit has developed into a significant platform for political discussion among Millennials. In this exploratory study, we examine subscription trends on three political sub-forums on Reddit during the 2016 US presidential elections: /The_Donald, /SandersForPresident, and /HillaryClinton. As a theoretical framework, we draw from work on online communities’ group identity and cohesion. Concretely, we investigate how subscription dynamics relate to positive, negative and neutral news events occurring during the election cycle. We classify news events using a sentiment analysis of event-related news headlines. We observe that users who supported Sanders displayed no consolidation of support for Clinton after she won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Secondly, we show that negative news events affected Sanders and Clintons subscription trends negatively, while showing no effect for Donald Trump. This gives empirical credence to Trump’s controversial claim that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters”. We offer a number of explanations for the observed phenomena: the nature of the content of the three subreddits, their cultural dynamics, and changing dynamics of partisanship. We posit that the ‘death of expertise’ expresses itself on Reddit as a switch in persuasion tactics from a policy-based to an emotions-based approach, and that group members’ agreement on policy proved a weak marker for online communities’ group identity and cohesion. We also claim that strong partisanship coupled with weak party affiliation among Millennials contributed to the low levels of Democratic support consolidation after Clinton won the nomination

Mustang Daily, January 28, 2002

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/6829/thumbnail.jp