No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but richer voters are on average best informed. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political platforms that are better aligned...

We investigate whether the plurality rule aggregates information efficiently in large elections with multiple alternatives, in which voters have common interests. Voters’ preferences depend on an unknown state of nature, and they receive imprecise private signals about the state of nature...

We study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies...

We consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision. Voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity. In contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information, in equilibrium voters collect...

We present a two-stage coordination game in which early choices of experts with special interests are observed by followers who move in the second stage. We show that the equilibrium outcome is biased toward the experts' interests even though followers know the distribution of expert interests...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

We study dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives. The agents are privately informed about their preferences, and have single-crossing utility functions. Monetary transfers are not feasible. We use an...

We present a model in which the media endorses the character of office-seeking candidates as a means to promote its own ideological agenda. In equilibrium, political parties completely pander to the elite-controlled media under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.

We study the policy choice of an office-holding politician who is concerned with the public's perception of his capabilities. The politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform. The reform's success depends critically on the politician's capabilities, which...