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"Information Aggregation in Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

The issue of how players' model of a game may evolves over time is largely unexplored. We formalize this issue for games with perfect information, and show that small-probability model deterioration may upset the complete-model backward induction solution, possibly yielding a Pareto-improving long run distribution of play. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the robustness of backward induction. These conditions can be interpreted with a forward-induction logic, and are shown to be closely related to the requirements for asymptotic stability of the backward induction path under standard evolutionary dynamics.

Group members value informed decisions and hold ideological preferences. A leader takes a decision on their behalf. Good leadership depends on characteristics of moderation and judgment. The latter emerges (endogenously) via advice communicated by "trustworthy associates." Trustworthy advice requires ideological proximity to the leader. A group may choose a relatively extreme leader with a large number of such associates. Paradoxically, this can happen though it is in the group's collective interest to choose a moderate leader. To assess whether these insights persist when political groups compete, we embed our analysis in a model of elections. Each of two parties chooses a leader who implements her preferred policy if elected. We find that a party may choose an extreme leader who defeats a moderate candidate chosen by the opposing party. Our results highlight the importance of party cohesion and the relations between a leader and her party. These can be more important to electoral success than proximity of a leader's position to the median voter.

AbstractWe model faction formation in a world where party politicians' objective is the development of an informed program of governance. Politicians' preferences reflect their own views and their information that, when aggregated via intraparty deliberations, influences the party manifesto. By joining a faction, a politician increases the influence of its leader on the manifesto, but foregoes his individual bargaining power. For broad model specifications, we find that a faction formation process allows power to be transferred to moderate politicians. This facilitates information sharing, increasing the capacity of the party to attain its objective. These positive welfare effects may hold even when factionalism restricts intraparty dialogue, and hold a fortiori when information is freely exchanged across factions. We conclude that the existence of ideological factions may benefit a party: It provides a means to tie uninformed or extremist politicians to more moderate and informed faction leaders.

It is well known that when agents are fully rational, compulsory public insurance may make all agents better off in the Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) model of insurance markets. We find that when sufficiently many agents underestimate their personal risks, compulsory insurance makes low-risk agents worse off. Hence, behavioral biases may weaken some of the well-established rationales for government intervention based on asymmetric information. (JEL D82, G22)

This paper brings mechanism design to the study of conflict resolution in international relations. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict, in a simple game where conflict is due to asymmetric information. Unmediated communication helps reducing the chance of conflict as it allows conflicting parties to reveal their types and establish type-dependent transfers to avoid conflict. Mediation improves upon unmediated communication when the intensity of conflict is high, or when asymmetric information is large. The mediator improves upon unmediated communication by not precisely reporting information to conflicting parties, and precisely, by not revealing to a player with probability one that the opponent is weak. Surprisingly, in our set up, arbitrators who can enforce settlements are no more effective in reducing the probability of conflict than mediators who can only make non-binding recommendations.

Electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars. Arguably, to paraphrase, "it does not provide enough choice" between candidates. This article provides a formal account of the perceived negative effects of platform convergence. We show that when parties do not know voters' preferences precisely, all voters ex ante prefer some platform divergence to convergence at the ex ante median. After characterizing the unique symmetric equilibrium of competition between responsible (policy-motivated) parties, we conclude that all voters ex ante prefer responsible parties to opportunistic (purely office-motivated) ones when parties are sufficiently ideologically polarized that platforms diverge, but not so polarized that they diverge excessively. However, greater polarization increases the scope for office benefits as an instrument for institutional design. We calculate the socially optimal level of platform divergence and show that office benefits can be used to achieve this first-best outcome, if parties are sufficiently ideologically polarized.

We analyze how communication and voting interact when there is uncertainty about players' preferences. We consider two players who vote on forming a partnership with uncertain rewards. It may or may not be worthwhile to team up. Both players want to make the right decision but differ in their attitudes toward making an error. Players' preferences are private information and each player is partially informed about the state of the world. Before voting, players can talk to each other.We completely characterize the equilibria and show that the main role of communication is to provide a double check: When there is a conflict between a player's preferences and her private information about the state, she votes in accordance with her private information only if it is confirmed by the message she receives from her opponent. In a scenario where only one of the players is allowed to talk, the benefits of communication are independent of the identity of the sender.