While people on all sides of the political spectrum were amazed that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination this paper demonstrates that Trump's victory was not a crazy event but rather the equilibrium outcome of a multi-candidate race where one candidate, the buffoon, is viewed as likely to...

We study dynamic sequential majoritarian campaigns between two players. The winner of the campaign is whomever wins the majority of individual battles. The resource being expended is determined exogenously to the campaign and has no scrap value. We demonstrate, in a fairly general environment,...

While people on all sides of the political spectrum were amazed that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination this paper demonstrates that Trump's victory was not a crazy event but rather the equilibrium outcome of a multi-candidate race where one candidate, the buffoon, is viewed as likely to...

This paper investigates the impact of increased media competition on the quantity and quality of news provided and, ultimately, on political participation. Drawing upon existing literature on vertical product differentiation, I explore the conditions under which an increase in the number of...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...

A well-known rationale for representative democracy is that direct democracy leads to a free-rider problem as to the collection of information. A problem with this rationale is that it takes for granted that representatives collect information. In this paper we examine whether or not electoral...

This paper studies, theoretically and experimentally, the effects of overconfidence and fake news on information aggregation and the quality of democratic choice in a common interest setting. We theoretically show that overconfidence exacerbates the adverse effects of widespread misinformation...

We model political information acquisition in large elections, where the probability of being pivotal is negligible. Our model builds on the assumption that informed citizens enjoy discussing politics with other informed citizens. The resulting information acquisition game exhibits strategic...

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about the candidates attach little value to information because they...

We demonstrate that a candidate competing in an asymmetric Tullock election contest may prefer that their rival candidate has access to information they themselves do not have. In the model, the extent of asymmetry between the candidates is ex-ante uncertain, but candidates can acquire...