The swing voter's curse with adversarial preferences

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kim, Jaehoon; Fey, Mark
• 署名单位: University of Rochester; University of Rochester
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2006.04.001
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 236-252
• 关键词: adversarial preferences; Pivotal voter; private information; voting; ELECTIONS

摘要

We analyze voting behavior in a large electorate in which voters have adversarial state-contingent preferences with incomplete information about the state of the world. We show that one type of voter can suffer from the swing voter's curse a la Feddersen and Pesendorfer [The swing voter's curse, Amer. Econ. Rev. 86 (1996) 408-424], and go on to characterize the symmetric Nash equilibria of this model under different parameter values. We prove that unlike settings with nonadversarial preferences, there are equilibria in which in one state of the world, a minority-preferred candidate almost surely wins the election and thus the election may fail to correctly aggregate information. Indeed, we show that the fraction of the electorate dissatisfied with the result can be as large as 662/3%. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.