Dynamic Campaign Spending

Avidit Acharya, Edoardo Grillo, Takuo Sugaya and Eray Turkel

No 601, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto

Abstract: We build a model of electoral campaigning in which two office-motivated candidates each allocate their budgets over time to affect their relative popularity, which evolves as a mean-reverting stochastic process. We show that in each period, the equilibrium ratio of spending by each candidate equals the ratio of their available budgets. This result holds across different specifications and extensions of the model, including extensions that allow for early voting, and an endogenous budget process. We also characterize how the path of spending over time depends not just on the rate of decay of popularity leads, but also the rate at which returns to spending are diminishing, rates of participation in early voting, and any feedback that short run leads in popularity have on the budget process.

Keywords: campaigns; dynamic allocation problems; contests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages 50
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wpaper:601

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