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Journal of Economic Theory
Volume 135, Issue 1, July 2007, Pages 236-252
 
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doi:10.1016/j.jet.2006.04.001    How to Cite or Link Using DOI (Opens New Window)
Copyright © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The swing voter's curse with adversarial preferences

Jaehoon Kima, Corresponding Author Contact Information, E-mail The Corresponding Author and Mark Feyb, E-mail The Corresponding Author

aW. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy, Harkness Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0158, USA bDepartment of Political Science, Harkness Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0146, USA

Received 18 August 2003; 
revised 6 April 2006. 
Available online 9 June 2006.

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Abstract

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 à 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 View the MathML source.

Keywords: Adversarial preferences; Pivotal voter; Private information; Voting; Elections

JEL classification codes: C72; D72


 
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