On the Resource Allocation for Political Campaigns

Sebastián Morales and Charles Thraves

Production and Operations Management, 2021, vol. 30, issue 11, 4140-4159

Abstract: In an election campaign, candidates must decide how to optimally allocate their efforts/resources optimally among the regions of a country. As a result, the outcome of the election will depend on the players' strategies and the voters' preferences. In this work, we present a zero‐sum game where two candidates decide how to invest a fixed resource in a set of regions, while considering their sizes and biases. We explore the two voting systems, the Majority System (MS) and the Electoral College (EC). We prove equilibrium existence and uniqueness under MS in a deterministic model; in addition, their closed form expressions are provided when fixing the subset of regions and relaxing the non‐negative investing constraint. For the stochastic case, we use Monte Carlo simulations to compute the players' payoffs. For the EC, given the lack of equilibrium in pure strategies, we propose an iterative algorithm to find equilibrium in mixed strategies in a subset of the simplex lattice. We illustrate numerical instances under both election systems, and contrast players' equilibrium strategies. We show that polarization induces candidates to focus on larger regions with negative biases under MS, whereas candidates concentrate on swing states under EC. Finally, we calibrate the analyzed models with real data from the US 2020 presidential election.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13507

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:popmgt:v:30:y:2021:i:11:p:4140-4159

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1937-5956

Access Statistics for this article

Production and Operations Management is currently edited by Kalyan Singhal

More articles in Production and Operations Management from Production and Operations Management Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().