that matters? Using a large-scale experiment we decompose the relative importance of partisan messages vs leader sources …

exploration and lower individual and group payoffs. We test our predictions in an online lab experiment and show that the …

newspaper would report on their performance shortly prior to the 2012 city elections. Using slum dwellers' spending preferences …

simple majority voting. However, even when experts are correctly identified, delegation must be used sparely because it … can choose to abstain. The first experiment follows a tightly controlled design planned for the lab; the second is a … underperforms relative to both universal voting and abstention …

contributions affect elections. Then we show how the candidates may wish to announce a range of policy preferences, rather than a … the primaries the candidates do not want to reveal too much information, to maintain some freedom of movement in the …We analyze a model in which voters are uncertain about the policy preferences of candidates. Two forces affect the …

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their …. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received …. Raising the threshold discourages signalling effort by low quality politicians but encourages effort by high quality …

We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the "paradox of voting" in a costly … voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is … literature as it is consistent with the empirical evidence. Incorporating this policy rule into a costly voting model with …

the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates …We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During …, canvassers supporting the candidates' list, or to a control group. While canvassers' visits increased turnout by 1.8 percentage …