Related papers: Beyond the Median Voter Theorem: A New Framework f…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
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…
Most familiar equilibrium concepts, such as Nash and correlated equilibrium, guarantee only that no single player can improve their utility by deviating unilaterally. They offer no guarantees against profitable coordinated deviations by…
Classical spatial models of two-party competition typically predict convergence to the median voter, yet real-world party systems often exhibit persistent and asymmetric polarization. We develop a spatial model of two-party competition in…
The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint of the MVH, an explanation of polarization is that each election has…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
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,…
We consider the following well-studied problem of metric distortion in social choice. Suppose we have an election with $n$ voters and $m$ candidates located in a shared metric space. We would like to design a voting rule that chooses a…
A voting rule decides on a probability distribution over a set of m alternatives, based on rankings of those alternatives provided by agents. We assume that agents have cardinal utility functions over the alternatives, but voting rules have…
We introduce a new framework to study the group dynamics and game-theoretic considerations when voters in a committee are allowed to trade votes. This model represents a significant step forward by considering vote-for-vote trades in a…
This paper studies the optimal extraction policy of an oil field as well as the efficient taxation of the revenues generated. Taking into account the fact that the oil price in worldwide commodity markets fluctuates randomly following…
The Hotelling-Downs model is a natural and appealing model for understanding strategic positioning by candidates in elections. In this model, voters are distributed on a line, representing their ideological position on an issue. Each…
This paper considers finitely many investors who perform mean-variance portfolio selection under relative performance criteria. That is, each investor is concerned about not only her terminal wealth, but how it compares to the average…
Could John Kerry have gained votes in the 2004 Presidential election by more clearly distinguishing himself from George Bush on economic policy? At first thought, the logic of political preferences would suggest not: the Republicans are to…
We study the problem of minimizing metric distortion in multi-winner elections, where a committee of size $k$ is selected from a set of candidates based on voters' ordinal preferences. We assume that voters and candidates are embedded on a…
Has ideological polarization actually increased in the last decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? We present a novel methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological…
We study the problem of optimally investing in nodes of a social network in a competitive setting, where two camps aim to maximize adoption of their opinions by the population. In particular, we consider the possibility of campaigning in…
In approval-based budget division, the task is to allocate a divisible resource to the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. For this setting, Brandl et al. [2021] have shown that no distribution rule can…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
We generalize the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to the problem of \emph{fair public decision making}, in which a decision must be made on several social issues simultaneously, and, unlike the classic setting, a…