Learning in elections and voter turnout equilibria

Stefano DeMichelis and Amrita Dhillon ()

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: Both complete and incomplete game Theoretic Models of Voter Turnout (Palfrey and Rosenthal, 1983,1985) have the problem of multiple equilibria, some of which seem unreasonable. How can the counter intuitive high turnout equilibria be explained? Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985) suggest that the main reason is that strategic uncertainty is too low in a complete information model. We show that this is not the main problem with these equilibria - incomplete information may exacerbate the problem of multiple equilibria. We propose a very intuitive criterion based on voter learning to distinguish reasonable equilibria. This paper makes precise the sense in which the high turnout equilibria in the Palfrey-Rosenthal model are not robust. We show how the model can be used to qualitatively explain several phenomena observed in reality.

JEL-codes: C72 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2008/twerp608.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Learning in Elections and Voter Turnout Equilibria (2001)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:608

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Margaret Nash ().