Suchergebnisse

We analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal. Ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so. Unlike previous duty-based models of participation, in our model an ethical agent's obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents. Our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior.

It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that the unanimity rule may lead to a high probability of both kinds of error and that the probability of convicting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury. Finally, we demonstrate that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.

We analyze a model of a two-candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences. We demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that, nevertheless, elections effectively aggregate voters' private information. Using examples, we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts. Increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed, however, may lead to higher levels of abstention. We conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes.