Related papers: The Political Economy of Zero-Sum Thinking
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
In an election campaign, candidates must decide how to optimally allocate their efforts/resources optimally among the regions of a country. As a result, the outcome of the election will depend on the players' strategies and the voters'…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
We study Bayesian Persuasion with multiple senders who have access to conditionally independent experiments (and possibly others). Senders have zero-sum preferences over information revealed. We characterize when any set of states can be…
The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate elections…
Competition among news sources may encourage some sources to share fake news and misinformation to influence the public. While sharing misinformation may lead to a short-term gain in audience engagement, it may damage the reputation of…
A general model for zero-sum stochastic games with asymmetric information is considered. In this model, each player's information at each time can be divided into a common information part and a private information part. Under certain…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on the efficiency of the current voting system in representing the people's will. Is the naive Plurality voting suitable in an extremely polarized…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy…
While voters from opposing parties have traditionally exhibited symmetric levels of hostility toward out-party candidates, our analysis of the 2016 and 2020 Nationscape data reveals a notable departure from this pattern. In 2016, negative…
We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatial model of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy preferences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voters' limited attention and how…
We propose a general framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about other votes or about other voters' knowledge about her own vote. In this setting we define notions of manipulation and equilibrium. We also model…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…