Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Voters Can Have Strong Incentives to Become Informed, or to Be Strategically Ignorant
نویسنده
چکیده
The instrumental incentives of sellsh voters to become politically informed seem to be diluted by low voter probabilities of being pivotal. This incentive dilution does not apply, however, to visible voter eeorts made before candidates nalize their policy positions. Also, while free-riding can dilute incentives within large groups, this dilution can be overwhelmed by scale economies in group information production. Even with strong information incentives and zero information costs, however, voters can still prefer ignorance over full information. Optimal ignorance emphasizes negative over positive news, and induces candidates to take stable policy positions. Such voters can prefer to commit to declining mechanisms, such as voting lotteries, which increase incentives to become informed. These results are demonstrated for independent mixed-strategy equilibria of an integrated probabilistic-voting model of prospective elections over both distributive and general policies, where voters eeorts determine the quality of their signals regarding candidate positions. Such equilibria exist.
منابع مشابه
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 on Incentives and Updating in Agent Based Models
متن کامل
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Aggregation and Dynamics of Survey Responses: the Case of Presidential Approval
In this paper we critique much of the empirical literature on the important political science concept of presidential approval. Much of the recent research on presidential approval has focused on the dynamic nature of approval; arguments have raged about whether presidential approval is integrated, co-integrated, or fractionally integrated. We argue that none of these time-series concepts, impo...
متن کاملDivision of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Equilibrium Equivalence with J Candidates and N Voters
In this paper, we examine the incentives facing candidates in the spatial voting model. We assume that voters' types are independent, but allow for nonidentical distributions across voters. Examining candidate positional equilibria as a function of voter behavior, we nd that what we term p-symmetric strict p-local equilibria when candidates maximize expected plurality are also strict p-local eq...
متن کاملNber Working Paper Series Experimenting with Measurement Error: Techniques with Applications to the Caltech Cohort Study
Measurement error is ubiquitous in experimental work. It leads to imperfect statistical controls, attenuated estimated effects of elicited behaviors, and biased correlations between characteristics. We develop simple statistical techniques for dealing with experimental measurement error. These techniques are applied to data from the Caltech Cohort Study, which conducts repeated incentivized sur...
متن کامل