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This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees and elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, and the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting and, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories.

This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees & elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, & the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting &, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractBilateral conflict involves an attacker with several alternative attack methods and a defender who can take various actions to better respond to different types of attack. These situations have wide applicability to political, legal, and economic disputes, but they are particularly challenging to study empirically because the payoffs are unknown. Moreover, each party has an incentive to behave unpredictably, so theoretical predictions are stochastic. This article reports results of an experiment where the details of the environment are tightly controlled. The results sharply contradict the Nash equilibrium predictions about how the two parties' choice frequencies change in response to the relative effectiveness of alternative attack strategies. In contrast, nonparametric quantal response equilibrium predictions match the observed treatment effects. Estimation of the experimentally controlled payoff parameters across treatments accurately recovers the true values of those parameters with the logit quantal response equilibrium model but not with the Nash equilibrium model.

We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on a citizen–candidate model with private information about ideal points. Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments; that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates more often than moderate citizens. Second, less entry occurs, with even greater polarization, when voters have directional information about candidates' ideal points, using ideological party labels. Nonetheless, this directional information is welfare enhancing because the inefficiency from greater polarization is outweighed by lower entry expenses and better voter information. Third, entry rates are decreasing in group size and the entry cost. These findings are all implied by properties of the unique symmetric Bayesian equilibrium cutpoint pair of the entry game. Quantitatively, we observe too little (too much) entry when the theoretical entry rates are high (low). This general pattern of observed biases in entry rates is implied by logit quantal response equilibrium.