This paper develops a model of electoral turnout where parties compensate voters for showing up to the polls. Existence and uniqueness conditions are shown to impose substantial restrictions on the uncertainty about partisan support faced by the parties, and on the distribution of voting costs...

We analyze an election in which voters are uncertain about which of two alternatives is better for them. Voters can, however, acquire some costly information about the alternatives. As the number of voters increases, individual investment in political information declines to zero. However, the...

We present a mobilization model of large elections with endogenous formation of voter groups. Citizens decide whether to be followers or become leaders (activists) and try to bring other citizens to vote for their preferred party. In the (unique) pure strategy equilibrium, the number of leaders...

We model electoral competition between two parties in a winner-take-all election. Parties choose strategically first their platforms and then their campaign spending under aggregate uncertainty about voters' preferences. We use the model to examine why campaign spending in the United States has...

In an influential article, Alesina and Drazen (1991) model delay of stabilization as the result of a struggle between political groups supporting reform plans with different distributional implications. In this paper we show that ex ante asymmetries in the costs of delay for the groups will...

We take a game-theoretic approach to the analysis of juries by modelling voting as a game of incomplete information. Rather than the usual assumption of two possible signals (one indicating guilt, the other innocence), we allow jurors to perceive a full spectrum of signals. Given any voting rule...

In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure whose equilibria converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the...

We examine the choice of voting rules by legal cartels with enforcement capabilities in the presence of uncertainty about demand and costs. We show that cartels face a trade-off between the commitment advantages of more stringent majority requirements and the loss of flexibility resulting from...

We investigate empirically the extent of misreporting in a poverty-alleviation program in which self-reported information, followed by a household visit, is used to determine eligibility. Underreporting may be due to a deception motive, and overreporting to an embarrassment motive. We find that...

Participation in a social program, like that in clubs and other social organizations, is the result of a process in which an agent first learns about the requirements, benefits, and the likelihood of acceptance, applies for membership, and finally is accepted or rejected. At each stage of the...