Primaries and the New Hampshire Effect

Candidates for U.S. presidential elections are determined through sequential elections in single states, the primaries. We develop a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning. The equilibrium replicates several stylized facts very well: Campaigning is very intensive in the first district. The outcome of the first election then creates an asymmetry in the candidates' incentives to campaign in the next district, which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts.On the normative side, our model offers a possible explanation for the sequential organization: It leads (in expectation) to a lower level of advertising expenditures than simultaneous elections. Moreover, if one of the candidates is the more effective campaigner, sequential elections also perform better with regard to the selection of the best candidate.     

Selection and incentives in contests: evidence from horse racing

The designer of internal labour market promotion contests must balance the need to select the best candidate with the need to provide incentives for all candidates. We use an extensive data set from horse racing – where there is abundant variation in contest design features – to analyse if there are particular features that help to achieve these two objectives. We find that contests with higher prize money and fewer participants are the most successful at achieving the dual remit of selection and incentives.     

Impact of electoral competition,swing voters and interest groups on equilibrium policy platforms: Exploring the strategic forces at work

This paper constructs a stylized model of election between two opportunistic candidates who can influence equilibrium policy platforms in exchange for monetary contributions provided by two distinct lobby groups. Two key features are embedded which give rise to a dual uncertainty in the model: the existence of partisan spread across voter groups as well as the embezzlement of campaign funds received by the electoral candidates from the interest groups. We derive and compare the equilibrium platforms of the two office-seeking candidates in three scenarios: none of the above uncertainties exist (benchmark case), only uncertainty about voters’ preferences exist (swing-voter case), and both the uncertainties exist (swing voters and lobby groups case). We find that an opportunistic candidate’s swing-voter tax platform is always lower than the benchmark tax platform. Additionally, the equilibrium tax choice of electoral contenders in the swing voters and opposing lobby groups case is found to be greater than the tax level chosen under the swing-voter case if the lobby group advocating a greater level of tax is sufficiently well-organized such that it outweighs the relative swing-voter effect in that group. Furthermore, we find that when an electoral candidate transitions from being highly corrupt to becoming relatively more honest, the equilibrium level of public good provision adjusts in conformity with the well-organized group’s economic preferences. Finally, if the strength of relative lobbying effect is weaker, a lower partisan bias within that group induces an electoral candidate to choose a tax platform closer to that group’s policy bliss point.     

Leadership and learning from the politicians

As we observe, the political candidates, we have a wonderful laboratory to discover what works and what does not in engaging followers to buy into the leader's message. Relationships and the ability of the candidate and the leader to feel a sense of personal attachment are important keys to success. Leaders who create this sense of magnetism often can tell the compelling stories that connect with people in the organization. The successful leader must first make the commitment to practice evidence-based leadership by examining best practices and modeling her/his leadership practice after these models.     

Strategic candidacy for multivalued voting procedures

Dutta et al. (Econometrica 69 (2001) 1013) (Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton—DJLeB) initiate the study of manipulation of voting procedures by a candidate who withdraws from the election. A voting procedure is candidate stable if this is never possible. We extend the DJLeB framework by allowing: (a) the outcome of the procedure to be a set of candidates; (b) some or all of the voters to have weak preference orderings of the candidates. When there are at least three candidates, any strongly candidate stable voting selection satisfying a weak unanimity condition is characterized by a serial dictatorship. This result generalizes Theorem 4 of DJLeB.     

Candidate strategies in primaries and general elections with candidates of heterogeneous quality

I consider a model in which candidates of differing quality must win a primary election to compete in the general election. I show that there is an equilibrium in which Democrats choose liberal policies and Republicans choose conservative policies, but higher quality candidates choose more moderate policies than lower quality candidates. In this equilibrium, higher quality candidates choose more moderate policies if they have a larger quality advantage or there is less uncertainty about the median voterʼs ideal point in the general election, and the candidates in a given primary choose closer policies to one another when there is a smaller quality difference between the candidates in a primary. I further show that if the candidates have policy motivations, then a low quality candidate may strategically choose to enter a primary even if running for office is costly and the candidate will lose the primary election with certainty in equilibrium.     

Arithmetics of research specialization

In hiring decisions, universities explicitly reward focusing on a specific field. I model the use of research specialization (focusing) in hiring as a signal of ability. Without explicit reward for focusing, candidates who focus are more likely to be able. However, if job market rewards focusing, less able candidates who would otherwise be indifferent between focusing or not, start focusing, which leads to smaller likelihood of observing an able candidate among those who focus than among those who do not. Specialization works as an effective ability signal only when generation of good ideas is highly likely for all ability levels.     

The strategic sincerity of Approval voting

We show that Approval voting need not trigger sincere behavior in equilibrium of Poisson voting games and hence might lead a strategic voter to skip a candidate preferred to his worst preferred approved candidate. We identify two main rationales for these violations of sincerity. First, if a candidate has no votes, a voter might skip him. Notwithstanding, we provide sufficient conditions on the voters’ preference intensities to remove this sort of insincerity. On the contrary, if the candidate gets a positive share of the votes, a voter might skip him solely on the basis of his ordinal preferences. This second type of insincerity is a consequence of the correlation of the candidates’ scores. The incentives for sincerity of rank scoring rules are also discussed.     

基于自组织方法的税收收入组合预测模型

自组织理论是基于神经网络和计算机科学的迅速发展而产生和发展起来的。它将黑箱思想、生物神经元方法、归纳法、概率论、数理逻辑等方法有机地组合起来。其主要思想是通过简单的初始输入（局部变量）的交叉组合产生第一代中间候选模型,再从第一代中间候选模型中选出最优的若干项组合而产生第二代中间候选模型,重复这样一个产生、选择和遗传进化过程,使模型复杂度不断增加,直到选出最优复杂度模型为止。本文利用自组织方法进行数据筛选和建立税收预测模型,并在数据筛选基础上建立线性回归预测模型和BP神经网络预测模型,然后结合时间序列的预测模型,利用自组织方法建立组合预测模型。通过预测结果比较得出了组合预测模型比其它单个模型具有更高的预测精度。     

Political salaries,electoral selection and the incumbency advantage: Evidence from a wage reform

Incumbents tend to gain solid electoral advantage in many voting systems. In this study, we examine the relationship between salaries prescribed to politicians and the incumbency advantage by exploiting a political wage reform and data from close elections in a proportional semi-open list system in the Czech Republic. We show that higher salaries reduce the average incumbency advantage, as they increase the probability to run again for previously non-elected candidates much more than for incumbents. Still, we find that higher wages improve candidate selection, especially by encouraging repeated candidacy from university-educated incumbents. Higher wages also improve relative positions of re-running incumbents on candidate lists compared to previously non-elected re-running candidates. Our results overall suggest that incumbency per se changes the relationship between political wages and candidate selection.     

Lies, damned lies, and political campaigns

Despite a pervasive presence in politics, lying has not traditionally played a role in formal models of elections. In this paper we develop a model that allows candidates in the campaign stage to misrepresent their policy intentions if elected to office, and in which the willingness to lie varies across candidates. We find that candidates more willing to lie are favored, but that this advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism and to such an extent that more honest candidates win a significant fraction of elections. Most notably, the possibility that some candidates lie more than others affects the behavior of all candidates, changing the nature of political campaigns in an empirically consistent manner. This effect also implies that misleading conclusions will be drawn if homogeneous candidate honesty is assumed.     

Manipulation through political endorsements

We study elections with three candidates under plurality voting. A candidate is a Condorcet loser if the majority of the voters place that candidate at the bottom of their preference rankings. We first show that a Condorcet loser might win the election in a three-way race. Next we introduce to the model an endorser who has private information about the true probability distribution of the preferences of the voters. Observable endorsements facilitate coordination among voters who may otherwise split their votes and lead to the victory of the Condorcet loser. When the endorser has an ideological bias towards one of the candidates, the coordination impact of endorsements remains unaltered, moreover the endorser successfully manipulates the outcome of the election in favor of his bias, even if his ideological bias is known by the voters. The results are true for any endorsement cost and any magnitude of bias as long as the electorate is large enough.     

THE ELECTORAL COSTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST POLITICS WHEN VOTERS ARE IGNORANT*

It is widely believed that the free-rider problem and the incentives to build minimum winning coalitions cause politics to reflect the preferences of special interest groups. Nevertheless, if voters do not know all the positions of all the candidates, then a candidate who proposes policies that benefit the public at large may defeat a candidate who depends on the support of special interests. Moreover, even if the latter candidate can win, he must use a publicity strategy which allows any voter to hear of proposals that benefit groups other than the voter's.     

Does having one’s own place to live make someone more employable?

This article encapsulates the findings of a randomized correspondence test field experiment investigating whether job candidates’ home status influences their employability. More than 2000 employers with vacancies in the Swedish labour market received a job application from a fictitious candidate. A job candidate’s home status (his or her own place to live or temporary housing with a friend) was randomized across employers. Results show that home status indeed affected the number of positive employer responses received by job candidates, mainly in low-skilled occupations. Not having a place to live at the time of the application proved a disadvantage when applying for positions within but an advantage when applying for positions outside the city of residence at the time of the application.     

Candidate reputations and the ‘incumbency effect’

A major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction — convergence of platforms to the median voter's ideal — is seldom observed. One reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes. Here we associate voters' expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements, and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their ‘reputations’ are perceived as less risky than challengers. In equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms. Typically neither adopts the median voter's ideal point. Either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent's reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively ‘risky’ the electorate perceives the challenger to be.     

Rewards from public office and the selection of politicians by parties

We investigate the relationship between the quality of politicians, defined in terms of their competence (skills), and rewards from public office in a game between parties and citizens in which parties play a crucial role in the selection of politicians. Parties shape the selection of politicians by manipulating information about the quality of their candidates. An increase in the rewards from public offices leads to two opposing effects on the average quality of politicians. The first is a selection effect, whereby more skilled citizens enter politics, leading to an increase in average quality. The second is a manipulation effect, as parties have the incentive to further manipulate information to increase the probability of election for their unskilled candidates, from whom they can extract higher rents in the form of service duties. We find that the second effect dominates when (i) parties’ costs of manipulating information are sufficiently low; (ii) even in the absence of manipulation, the quality of information available to citizens about candidates is sufficiently poor; and (iii) the net gains from becoming a politician for unskilled citizens are sufficiently larger than those for skilled citizens. These findings provide a rationale for the ambiguous sign of the empirical relationship between the quality and pay of politicians.     

Information transfer and aggregation in an uninformed committee: A model for the selection and use of biased expert advice

A committee of five uses majority rule for decisions on two public goods. Individual committee member preferences depend on a state of nature that is unknown to the committee members but the state of nature is known to two experts who have preferences about committee decisions. Experts have no vote on the committee but provide a recommendation to the committee at the opening of a meeting. Two experts who have known, opposing biases are selected – a dyadic mechanism. The results reveal that experts do not tell the truth but committee decisions are as if committee members know what the experts know. The information transfer occurs because committee members anticipate the biases and properly infer the information held by the experts.     

Partisan politics and election failure with ignorant voters

We analyze candidate competition when some voters do not observe a candidate's policy choice. Voters have a personality preference when both candidates offer the same policy. In equilibrium, the candidate with a personality advantage may get elected with a partisan policy even though his opponent's policy is preferred by all voters. The departure from the Downsian prediction is most pronounced when candidates have a weak policy preference and care mostly about winning the election. In that case, uninformed voters choose the candidate with the preferred personality even if electing this candidate implies a lower payoff on average.     

Abstention and signaling in large repeated elections

I consider a two period model of repeated elections in which politicians update their beliefs about the preferences of the voters after the first period election and set second period policies accordingly. When voting is costless, a positive fraction of voters abstains for any finite population, but abstention vanishes in the limit of an arbitrarily large election. I demonstrate that in large elections, a single vote changes second period policies by an amount exponentially large compared to the probability of influencing the first period election if the probabilities with which voters vote for the two candidates differ. Using this, I prove that the limiting voting behavior in the first election is independent of the first period policy choices of the candidates. The incentive to vote to signal oneʼs preferences thus dominates the incentive to vote to increase the chances of electing oneʼs preferred candidate.     

Perverse committee appointments may foster divide and rule

A plurality-rule spatial committee can select an extreme decision if a bare minority of members prefer the opposite extreme decision: the majority who prefer a moderate decision are immobilised by internal divisions. Consequently, a nominator may appoint candidates with the opposite preference ordering so as to build up the bare minority. Our results may explain why Disraeli extended the franchise to skilled male workers in 1867 against centrist opposition; and why an electorate whose preferences are not polarized may have to choose between extremist candidates.