Elections as Targeting Contests

This paper develops a model of electoral turnout where parties compensate voters for showing up to the polls. Existence and uniqueness conditions are shown to impose substantial restrictions on the uncertainty about partisan support faced by the parties, and on the distribution of voting costs among citizens. The model predicts that voters in the minority will be more likely to vote, and that turnout increases with the importance of the election. The model can generate the observed correlation between election closeness and electoral turnout, lthough the cause of this correlation may depend on the distribution of voting costs.Elections

Rational Ignorance and Voting Behavior

We model a two-alternative election in which voters may acquire information about which is the best alternative for all voters. Voters differ in their cost of acquiring information. We show that as the number of voters increases, the fraction of voters who acquire information declines to zero. However, if the support of the cost distribution is not bounded away from zero, there is an equilibrium with some information acquisition for arbitrarily large electorates. This equilibrium dominates in terms of welfare any equilibrium without information acquisition--even though generally there is too little information acquisition with respect to an optimal strategy profile.

Simple Plurality versus Plurality Runoff with Privately Informed Voters

This paper compares two voting methods commonly used in presidential elections: simple plurality voting and plurality runoff. In a situation in which a group of voters have common interests but do not agree on which candidate to support due to private information, information aggregation requires them to split their support between their favorite candidates. However, if a group of voters split their support between their favorite candidates, they increase the probability that the winner of the election is not one of them. In a model with three candidates, due to this tension between information aggregation and the need for coordination, plurality runoff leads to higher expected utility for the majority than simple plurality voting if the information held by voters about the candidates is not very accurate.

When Are Stabilizations Delayed? Alesina-Drazen Revisited

In an influential article, Alesina and Drazen (1991) model delay of stabilization as the result of a struggle between political groups supporting reform plans with different distributional implications. In this paper we show that ex ante asymmetries in the costs of delay for the groups will reduce the probability of conflict and will lead to a shorter expected delay. Accurate common information about the cost of delay may lead to no delay at all. In an asymmetric conflict, a wider divergence in the distributional implications of reform will reduce the probability of conflict but will lead to a longer expected delay.Stabilization delay, economic reforms, war of attrition

Voting in Cartels: Theory and Evidence from the Shipping Industry

We examine the choice of voting rules by legal cartels with enforcement capabilities in the presence of uncertainty about demand and costs. We show that cartels face a trade-off between the commitment advantages of more stringent majority requirements and the loss of flexibility resulting from them. Expected heterogeneity in costs or demand conditions leads away from simple majority toward more stringent rules, while larger membership to the cartel leads away from unanimity toward less restrictive rules. Evidence from the shipping conferences of the late 1950s largely supports our model. With few firms, the rule favored by heterogeneous conferences is unanimity. In larger cartels, the favored rule is either 2/3 or 3/4-majority rule.

The Role of Media Slant in Elections and Economics

We formalize the concept of media slant as a relative emphasis on different issues of political interest by the media, and we illustrate the effects of the media choice of slant on political outcomes and economic decisions in a rational expectations model. In a two-candidate election, if the media is biased in favor of the underdog, then it will put more emphasis on issues with a large electoral impact, hoping that the news will deliver an upset victory. Whether citizens are better off with media biased in favor of the underdog or the frontrunner depends on the importance of choosing the "right" candidate for citizens versus the impact of political news on the private economic decisions of voters. Balanced media, giving each issue equal coverage, may be worse for voters than partisan media.

A Bayesian Model of Voting in Juries

We take a game-theoretic approach to the analysis of juries by modelling voting as a game of incomplete information. Rather than the usual assumption of two possible signals (one indicating guilt, the other innocence), we allow jurors to perceive a full spectrum of signals. Given any voting rule requiring a fixed fraction of votes to convict, we characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of the game, and we consider the possibility of asymmetric equilibria: we give a condition under which no asymmetric equilibria exist and show that, without under which no asymmetric equilibria exist and show that, without it, asymmetric equilibria may exist. We offer a condition under which unanimity rule exhibits a bias toward convicting the innocent, regardless of the size of the jury, and we exhibit an example showing this bias can be reversed. And we prove a "jury theorem" for our general model: as the size of the jury increases, the probability of a mistaken judgment goes to zero for every voting rule, except unanimity rule; for unanimity rule, we give a condition under which the probability of a mistake is bounded strictly above zero, and we show that, without this condition, the probability of a mistake may go to zero.

Policy Reversals and Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Parties

We develop a spatial model of competition between two policy-motivated parties. Parties know a state of the world which determines which policies are desirable for voters, while voters do not. The announced positions of the parties serve as signals to the voters concerning the parties' private information. In all separating equilibria, when the left-wing party attains power, the policies it implements are to the right of the policies implemented by the right-wing party when it attains power. The intuition behind this result is that when right-wing policies become more attractive, the left party moves toward the right in order to be assured of winning, while the right-wing party stays put in a radical stance.spatial models, party competition, asymmetric information, separating equilibria