How to win a large election

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mandler, Michael
• 署名单位: University of London; Royal Holloway University London
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2012.09.005
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 44-63
• 关键词: Elections; Expected margin of victory; law of large numbers; Local limit theorem

摘要

We consider the optimization problem of a campaign trying to win an election when facing aggregate uncertainty, where agents' voting probabilities are uncertain. Even a small amount of uncertainty will in a large electorate eliminate many of counterintuitive results that arise when voting probabilities are known. In particular, a campaign that can affect the voting probabilities of a fraction of the electorate should maximize the expected difference between its candidate's and the opposing candidate's share of the fraction's potential vote. When a campaign can target only finitely many voters, maximization of the same objective function remains optimal if a convergence condition is satisfied. When voting probabilities are certain, this convergence condition obtains only at knife-edge combinations of parameters, but when voting probabilities are uncertain the condition is necessarily satisfied. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.