Voting Behavior and Information Aggregation in Elections with Private Information

The authors analyze two-candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters. They assume each voter has noisy private information about the state variable. The authors show that, in equilibrium, almost all voters ignore their private signal when voting. Nevertheless, elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge.