Funding Asymmetries in Electoral Competition: How important is a level playing field?

I investigate the idea that campaign spending limits may help to level the playing field in electoral competition between parties who have unequal access to campaign funds. The model assumes that the supporters of one party are on average wealthier than those who support a competing party. Contributions are used to finance advertisements that truthfully reveal information about the quality of candidates. Voters update their beliefs rationally based on information revealed during the campaign. Rational beliefs are shown to compensate for funding asymmetries in equilibrium. As a result, asymmetries in access to funds do not bias the electoral outcome from an ex ante perspective. A limit on campaign expenditures does not affect the relative chances of the two parties, while leading to unintended negative consequences. I conclude that the level playing field argument in support of expenditure limitations is inconsistent with the key assumptions of the analysis and offer some suggestions for future research.Elections, Campaign Finance, Parties, Campaign Contributions, Asymmetries, Voting

Who never tells a lie?

Erat and Gneezy (2012) conduct an experiment to test whether people avoid lying in a situation where doing so would lead to a Pareto improvement. They conclude that many people exhibit such a "pure lie aversion." I argue that the experiment does not provide a reliable test for such an aversion, and that the evidence does not support the authors' conclusion. I conduct two new experiments which are explicitly designed to test for a 'pure' aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally

“One Man, One Dollar”? Examining the equalization argument in support of campaign contribution limits

Arguably the most important campaign finance regulations in U.S. federal elections are limits imposed on the amount that an individual or organization may donate to a federal campaign. Such contribution limits are advocated on two separate grounds. The first is that they prevent corruption, the second is that they democratize the financing of campaigns by equalizing the relative influence of donors. According to the latter argument, an equalization of donor influence is desirable because it causes campaign resources to more accurately reflect public support for candidates and their political ideas. I construct a formal model to illustrate this equalization argument in support of contribution limits. The analysis calls attention to a number of implicit assumptions underlying the corresponding money primary analogy for campaign fund-raising. The central assumption is that a candidate’s reliance on large contributions is an indicator of negative characteristics not revealed through her campaign communication. The model also suggests a method for testing this assumption, as it implies a negative relationship between a candidate’s reliance on large contributions and her electoral success. Using data on elections to the House of Representatives between 1990 and 2002, I find no evidence that such a negative relationship exists. This empirical result casts doubt on the equalization argument in support of campaign contribution limits.Elections, Campaign Contributions, Speech, Signaling, Campaign Advertising, Corruption, Inequality, Equality, First Amendment, Buckley

Voting rules in multilateral bargaining: using an experiment to relax procedural assumptions

Experiments can be used to relax technical assumptions that are made by necessity in theoretical analysis, and further test the robustness of theoretical predictions. To illustrate this point we conduct a three-person bargaining experiment examining the effect of different decision rules (unanimity and majority rule). Our experiment implements the substantive assumptions of the Baron-Ferejohn model but imposes no structure on the timing of proposals and votes. We compare our results to those obtained from an earlier experiment which implemented the specific procedural assumptions of the model. Our results are in many ways very similar to those from the more structured experiment: we find that most games end with the formation of a minimum winning coalition, and unanimity rule is associated with greater delay. However, the earlier finding of "proposer power" is reversed. While some important patterns are robust to the less stringent implementation of procedural assumptions, our less structured experiment provides new insights into how multilateral bargaining may play out in real world environments with no strict procedural rules on timing of offers and agreements

Playing 'Hard to Get': An Economic Rationale for Crowding Out of Intrinsically Motivated Behavior

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The central idea is that the potential to earn rewards in return for an activity may create incentives to play 'hard to get' in an effort to increase those rewards. We discuss two specic contexts in which such incentives arise. In the first, refraining from the activity causes others to attach higher value to it because it becomes scarce. In the second, restraint serves to conceal the actor's intrinsic motivation. In both cases, not engaging in the activity causes others to offer larger rewards. Our theory yields the testable prediction that such effects are likely to occur when a motivated actor enjoys a sufficient degree of 'market power.

Commitment and Conflict in Multilateral Bargaining

We extend the Baron and Ferejohn (1989) model of multilateral bargaining by allowing the players to attempt commiting to a bargaining position prior to negotiating. If successful,commitment binds a player to reject any proposal which allocates to her a share below a self-imposed threshold. Any such attempted commitment fails and decays with an exogenously given probability. We characterize and compare symmetric stationary subgame perfect equilibria under unanimity rule and majority rules. Under unanimity rule, there are potentially many equilibria which can be ordered from the least to most inefficient, according to how how many commitment attempts must fail in order for an agreement to arise. The most inefficient equilibrium exists independently of the number of players, and the delay in this equilibrium is increasing in the number of players. In addition, more efficient commitment profiles cannot be sustained in equilibrium if the number of players is sufficiently large. The expected inefficiency due to delay at the least and at the most efficient equilibrium increases as the number of players increases. Under any (super)majority rule, however, there is no equilibrium with delay or inefficiency. The reason is that competition to be included in the winning coalition discourages attempts to commit to an aggressive bargaining position. We also show that inefficiencies related to unanimity decision making may be aggravated by longer lags between consecutive bargaining rounds. The predicted patterns are by and large consistent with observed inefficiencies in many international arenas including the European Union, WTO, and UNFCCC. The results suggest that the unanimity rule is particularly damaging if the number of legislators is large and the time lags between consecutive sessions are long

Group size and decision rules in legislative bargaining

We conduct experiments to investigate the effects of different majority requirements on bargaining outcomes in small and large groups. In particular, we use a Baron-Ferejohn protocol and investigate the effects of decision rules on delay (number of bargaining rounds needed to reach agreement) and measures of "fairness" (inclusiveness of coalitions, equality of the distribution within a coalition). We find that larger groups and unanimity rule are associated with significantly larger decision making costs in the sense that first round proposals more often fail, leading to more costly delay. The higher rate of failure under unanimity rule and in large groups is a combination of three facts: (1) in these conditions, a larger number of individuals must agree, (2) an important fraction of individuals reject offers below the equal share, and (3) proposers demand more (relative to the equal share) in large groups

Promises and Opportunity Cost

This paper experimentally investigates the hypothesis that promise-keeping behavior is affected by the opportunities that a counterpart foregoes by relying on the promise. We present two motivational mechanisms that could drive such an effect. One is that people dislike causing harm through a promise, and the natural way to measure such harm is to take into account what the counterpart would have received had she not relied on the promise. The other is that people may dislike causing regret in another person. We test these ideas in the context of an experimental trust game. The main treatment variable is the payoff that the first mover forgoes if he “trusts”. Consistent with our main hypothesis, we find that an increase in this foregone payoff increases promise-keeping behavior. The experiment is designed to rule out alternative explanations for such an effect. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism driving the effect may involve an aversion to causing regret in others

The dynamics of coalition formation - a multilateral bargaining experiment with free timing of moves

We experimentally study behavior in a finitely repeated coalition formation game played in real time. Subjects interact in groups of three, bargaining over the distribution of payments which occur at regular time intervals. During a given interval, payments occur if and only if a majority is in agreement about their allocation. Aside from these rules, we purposefully impose little structure on the bargaining process. We investigate the frequency and stability of different types of agreements, as well as transitions between them. The most frequent agreement is an equal split between two players, leaving the third with nothing. The most stable is the three-way equal split. Transitions between agreements are frequent and generally consistent with myopic payoff maximization. We find evidence that both fairness concerns and risk aversion may explain the prevalence of the three-way equal split, and that loyalty can play a role in cementing coalitions

A short note on the rationality of the false consensus effect

In experiments which measure subjects’ beliefs, both beliefs about others’ behavior and beliefs about others’ beliefs, are often correlated with a subject’s own choices. Such phenomena have been interpreted as evidence of a causal relationship between beliefs and behavior. An alternative explanation attributes them to what psychologists refer to as a ‘false consensus effect’. It is my impression that the latter explanation is often prematurely dismissed because it is thought to be based on an implausible psychological bias. The goal of this note is to show that the false consensus effect does not rely on such a bias. I demonstrate that rational belief formation implies a correlation of behavior and beliefs of all orders whenever behaviorally relevant traits are drawn from an unknown common distribution. Thus, if we assume that subjects rationally update beliefs, correlations of beliefs and behavior cannot support a causal relationship