Pandering and state-specific costs of mismatch in political agency

Guido Merzoni () and Federico Trombetta

Games and Economic Behavior, 2022, vol. 135, issue C, 132-143

Abstract: We study the implications of state-dependent costs of policy mismatch in political agency models where politicians have reputational concerns and “good” politicians share the same objectives as the voters. We find that state-dependent costs can increase the set of parameters where pandering is an equilibrium strategy. Indeed, in our model, pandering can arise even without office rents. Moreover, we show that voters do not necessarily prefer biased politicians to be in favour of the policy that produces the cheapest expected cost of mismatch.

Keywords: Asymmetric mismatch; Pandering; Political agency; Special interest groups; Populism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622000781
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:135:y:2022:i:c:p:132-143

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.05.001

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().