Related papers: A Model of Presidential Debates
Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a…
We study public persuasion when a sender communicates with a large audience that can fact-check at heterogeneous costs. The sender commits to a public information policy before the state is realized, but any verifiable claim she makes after…
We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert…
Debate and deliberation play essential roles in politics and government, but most models presume that debates are won mainly via superior style or agenda control. Ideally, however, debates would be won on the merits, as a function of which…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise endogenously.…
Often times, a candidate's attractiveness is directly associated with his clear ideologies and opinions on various policies and social issues. Using the ideas of stochastic differential equations and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process, we develop a…
Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…
This paper develops a model in which a sender strategically communicates with a group of receivers whose payoffs depend on the sender's information. It is shown that aggregate payoff externalities create an endogenous conflict of interests…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
We introduce a general contagion-like model for competing opinions that includes dynamic resistance to alternative opinions. We show that this model can describe candidate vote distributions, spatial vote correlations, and a slow approach…
In traditional voter models, opinion dynamics are driven by interactions between individuals, where an individual adopts the opinion of a randomly chosen neighbor. However, these models often fail to capture the emergence of entirely new…
This study explores the concept of prominence as a candidate trait, understood as the perceived worthiness of attention candidates elicit from regular citizens in the context of low information elections. It proposes two dimensions of…
Our preferences depend on the circumstances in which we reveal them. We will introduce a dependency which allows us to illustrate the relation between the possibility of winning of particular candidates in a quantum election and the type of…
In dialogues in which both agents are autonomous, each agent deliberates whether to accept or reject the contributions of the current speaker. A speaker cannot simply assume that a proposal or an assertion will be accepted. However, an…
For some problems, humans may not be able to accurately judge the goodness of AI-proposed solutions. Irving et al. (2018) propose that in such cases, we may use a debate between two AI systems to amplify the problem-solving capabilities of…
Does electoral replacement ensure that officeholders eventually act in voters' interests? We study a reputational model of accountability. Voters observe incumbents' performance and decide whether to replace them. Politicians may be "good"…