Suchergebnisse

Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter's position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have about their opponents. In a controlled incentivized experiment, I find that candidates diverge substantially and that primaries have little effect on average positions. Voters employ a strategy that weeds out candidates who are either too moderate or too extreme, which enhances ideological purity without increasing divergence. The analysis highlights the importance of behavioral assumptions in understanding the effects of electoral institutions.

Game harmony describes how harmonious (nonconflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are in a game, as embodied in the game's raw payoffs. It departs from the traditional game-theoretic approach in that it is a nonequilibrium behavioral approach that can be psychologically founded. The authors experimentally test the predictive power of basic game harmony measures on a variety of well-known 2 × 2 games and randomly generated 2 × 2 and 3 × 3 generic games. The findings support its all-rounded predictive power. Game harmony provides an alternative tool that is both powerful and parsimonious, as it does not require information on a player's degree of rationality, social preferences, beliefs, and perceptions.

We introduce a set-valued solution concept, M equilibrium, to capture empirical regularities from over half a century of game theory experiments. We show M equilibrium serves as a meta theory for various models that hitherto were considered unrelated. M equilibrium is empirically robust and, despite being set-valued, falsifiable. Results from a series of experiments that compare M equilibrium to leading behavioral game theory models demonstrate its virtues in predicting observed choices and stated beliefs. Data from experimental games with a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium and multiple M equilibria exhibit coordination problems that could not be anticipated through the lens of existing models. (JEL C72, C90, D83)