Do political parties benefit electorally from a personal vote cultivated by their candidates? How do these benefits vary across electoral systems? This paper explores these questions, so far underaddressed despite their importance, through a comparative analysis of parties' electoral gains from...

We study the competitive equilibrium of a market for votes where voters can trade votes for a numeraire before making a decision via majority rule. The choice is binary and the number of supporters of either alternative is known. We identify a sufficient condition guaranteeing the existence of...

We study the use of customer voting systems that enable information acquisition from strategic customers to improve pricing and product development decisions. In these systems, the firm presents customers with a product design and gives them the opportunity to cast a vote on this design, a vote...

Increasing concern over corporate governance has led to calls for more shareholder in uence over corporate decisions, but allowing shareholders to vote on more issues, such as executive compensation, may not affect the quality of governance. We should expect instead that, under current rules,...

We present a model of two-stage elections in which candidates can choose different platforms in primaries and general elections. Voters do not directly observe the chosen platforms, but rather infer the candidates' ideologies from signals made during the campaign (debates, speeches), where a...

The goal of this paper is to examine the incentives to vote insincerely, other than those created by rounding, faced by voters in the systems of proportional representation (PR). We rigorously investigate two models of voter behaviour. The first model assumes that a voter is primarily interested...

Democratic elections increasingly involve political intermediaries (e.g. grassroots organizations or political brokers). We develop a model of electoral competition in which candidates must decide between brokers (patronage) and grassroots organizations. Our model shows that patronage is more...

We introduce a framework to examine, both theoretically and empirically, electoral maldistricting. Maldistricting is defined as districting in pursuit of a policy at the expense of social welfare. Analysis is performed on the set of implementable (via some district map) legislatures, which are...

Ideally, a representative democracy awards a genuine vote to each adult. We study whether this applies in competitive democracies with an election model combining district appor- tionment and proportional representation (PR). Four classic seat allocation rules, including d'Hondt (1882), are...

Citizen demands for more accountability and transparency are implicitly grounded in a model of political representation based primarily on sanctions, in which the interests of the representative (in economic terms, the agent) are presumed to conflict with those of the constituent (in economic...