Voting over economic plans

We review and provide motivation for a one-sector model of economic growth in which decisions about capital accumulation are made by a political process. If it is possible to commit for at least three periods into the future, then for any feasible consumption plan, there is a perturbation that is majority-preferred to it. Furthermore, plans that minimize the maximum vote that can be obtained against them yield a political business cycle. If it is impossible to commit, voters select the optimal consumption plan for the median voter

Covering, Dominance, and Institution Free Properties of Social Change

This paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar, so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules. Specifically, in a multidimensional setting, where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences, it is shown that the "uncovered set" contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings. The three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate, cooperative behavior in small committees, and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously. Because of its apparent institution free properties, the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist. A general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven, and for the Downsian case, bounds for the uncovered set are computed. These bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

Game Forms for Nash Implementation of General Social Choice Correspondences

Several game forms are given for implementing general social choice correspondences (SCC's) which satisfy Haskin's conditions of monotonicity and No Veto Power. The game forms have smaller strategy spaces than those used in previously discovered mechanisms: the strategy for an individual consists of an alternative, two subsets (of alternatives), and a player number. For certain types of economic and political SCC's, including a-majority rule, the Walrasian, and Lindahl correspondence, the strategy space reduces to an alternative and a vector, where the number of components of the vector is at most twice the dimension of the alternative space

Generalized symmetry conditions at a core point

Previous analyses have shown that if a point is to be a core of a majority rule voting game in Euclidean space, when preferences are smooth, then the utility gradients at the point must satisfy certain restrictive symmetry conditions. In this paper, these results are generalized to the case of an arbitrary voting rule, and necessary and sufficient conditions, expressed in terms of the utility gradients of "pivotal" coalitions, are obtained

A Theory of Voting in Large Elections

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections. In our model, voters’ strategies form a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE), which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior. We first show that a QRE in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates, and then proceed to show that, with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters’ utilities, a Nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory. This equilibrium (1) consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters’ utilities, (2) exists even when voters can abstain, and (3) is unique when there are only 2 candidates

Quantal Response Equilibria for Extensive Form Games

This paper investigates the use of standard econometric models for quantal choice to study equilibria of extensive form games. Players make choices based on a quantal choice model, and assume other players do so as well. We define an Agent Quantal Response Equilibrium (AQRE), which applies QRE to the agent normal form of an extensive form game and imposes a statistical version of sequential rationality. We also define a parametric specification, called logit-AQRE, in which quantal choice probabilities are given by logit response functions. AQRE makes predictions that contradict the invariance principle in systematic ways. We show that these predictions match up with some experimental findings by Schotter, Weigelt and Wilson (1993) about the play of games that differ only with respect to inessential transformations of the extensive form. The logit-AQRE also implies a unique selection from the set of subgame perfect equilibria in generic extensive form games. We examine data from signalling game experiments by Banks, Camerer, and Porter (1994) and Brandts and Holt (1993). We find that the logit-AQRE selection applied to these games succeeds in predicting patterns of behavior observed in these experiments, even when our prediction conflicts with more standard equilibrium refinements, such as the intuitive criterion. We also reexamine data from the McKelvey and Palfrey (1992) centipede experiment

Elections with Limited Information: A Multidimensional Model

We develop a game theoretic model of 2 candidate competition over a multidimensional policy space, where the participants have incomplete information about the preferences and strategy choices of other participants. The players consist of the voters and the candidates. Voters are partitioned into two classes, depending on the information they observe. Informed voters observe candidate strategy choices while uninformed voters do not. All players (voters and candidates alike) observe contemporaneous poll data broken down by various subgroups of the population. The main results of the paper give conditions on the number and distribution of the informed and uninformed voters which are sufficient to guarantee that any equilibrium (or voter equilibrium) extracts all information

Engodeneity of Alternating Offers in a Bargaining Game

We investigate an infinite horizon two-person simultaneous offer bargaining game of incomplete information with discounted playoffs. In each period, each player chooses to give in or hold out. The game continues until at least one of the players chooses to give in, at which point agreement has been reached and the game terminates, with an agreement benefit accruing to each player, and a cost to the player (or players) that give in. Players have privately known agreement benefits. 'Low benefit players have a weakly dominant strategy to hold out forever; high benefit players would be better off giving in if they knew their opponent was planning to hold out forever. For any discount factor there is a unique Nash equilibrium in which the two players alternate in their willingness to give in, if the players' priors about each others type are sufficiently asymmetric. Second, for almost all priors, this is the unique equilibrium if the discount factor is close enough to one

A Decade of Experimental Research on Spatial Models of Elections and Committees

The Euclidean representation of political issues and alternative outcomes, and the associated representation of preferences as quasi-concave utility functions is by now a staple of formal models of committees and elections. This theoretical development, moreover, is accompanied by a considerable body of experimental research. We can view that research in two ways: as a test of the basic propositions about equilibria in specific institutional settings, and as an attempt to gain insights into those aspects of political processes that are poorly understood or imperfectly modeled, such as the robustness of theoretical results with respect to procedural details and bargaining environments. This essay reviews that research so that we can gain some sense of its overall import