The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory

Marco Battaglini, Rebecca Morton and Thomas Palfrey

No 19, Working Papers from New York University, Center for Experimental Social Science

Abstract: This paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter's curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on "pivotal voter" models. Our experiment controls for different information levels of voters, as well as teh size of the electorate, the distribution of preferences, and other theoretically relevant parameters. The design varies hte share of partisan voters and the prior elief abouta payoff relevant state of the world. Our results support the equilibrium predictions of the Feddersen-Pesendorfer model, and clearly reject the notion that voters in the laboratory use naive decision-theoretic strategies. The voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter's curse and adjust their behavior to compensate. While the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behavior, we find that aggregate outcomes, such as efficiency, turnout, and margin of victory, closely track the theoretical predictions.

Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2007-12-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
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Related works:
Journal Article: The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory (2010)
Working Paper: The Swing Voter’s Curse in the Laboratory (2007)
Working Paper: The Swing Voter’s Curse in the laboratory (2006)
Working Paper: The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory (2006)
Working Paper: The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory (2005)
Working Paper: The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory (2005)
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