This paper discusses the implications of strategic voting for institutional design in environments where the only role of elections is to aggregate information. We adopt a mechanism design perspective, which assumes that prior to a standard voting game, a fictitious designer has to select the...

The paper considers public funding of political parties when some voters are poorly informed about parties' candidates and campaigns are informative. For symmetric equilibria, it is shown that more public funding leads parties to chose more moderate candidates, and that an increase in the...

The paper analyses a model of electoral campaigning as a problem of competitive delegation. We model a situation in which there is uncertainty about what the optimal policy should be and about the extent of candidates' bias. While voters know whether the candidate is left or right wing, the bias...

We experimentally study behavior in a simple voting game where players have private information about their preferences. With random matching, subjects overwhelmingly follow the dominant strategy to exaggerate their preferences, which leads to inefficiency. We analyze an exogenous linking...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

Decision makers lacking crucial specialist know-how often consult with better informed but biased experts. In our model the decision maker's choice problem is binary and her preferred option depends on the state of the world unknown to her. The expert observes the state and sends a report to the...

This paper compares centralized and decentralized policymaking in a game theoretic model of informational lobbying and political contributions. In the model, an interest group first produces verifiable evidence about the welfare effects of its preferred policy and then engages in monetary...

In this note, we characterize the equilibria of the standard pivotal-voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes, as originally proposed by Palfrey and Rosenthal [1983. A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice. 41, 7-53]

Whom should an interest group lobby in a legislature? I develop a model of informational lobbying in which a legislature must decide on the allocation of a local publicly-provided good across districts. An interest group chooses sequentially to search and provide information on districts'...