Ricardo Alonso (LSE)

Date(s)
Wednesday 4th November 2015 (14:00-15:00)
Description
This week's seminar will be given by Ricardo Alonso from the London School of Economics.  Ricardo's research interests include: Organisational Economics; Contract Theory; Personnel Economics; Economics of Information and Behavioural Economics

Title: Political Disagreement and Information in Elections

Abstract: We study a probabilistic voting model in which candidates representing two different groups of voters compete for office. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority group wins with a probability that increases in the degree of political Disagreement - the difference in expected payoffs from the policies supported by the candidates. Prior to the election, the incumbent party (IP) is able to influence voters' behavior by designing a policy experiment, i.e. a public signal about a payoff-relevant state. We show that if the IP supports the majority candidate, then it uses this experiment to increase political disagreement and hence her victory probability. We then define conditions such that (i) the IP optimally chooses an upper-censoring experiment, which fully reveals low disagreement states and pools high disagreement states, and (ii) the experiment's informativeness decreases with the majority candidate's competence. Finally, we show how the IP uses information to increase disagreement even when all voters share the same payoff function, so that political disagreement is solely due to belief disagreement.

Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics

Sir Clive Granger Building
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0)115 951 5458
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