Electoral Campaigns as Dynamic Contests

Avidit Acharya (), Takuo Sugaya () and Eray Turkel ()
Additional contact information
Avidit Acharya: Stanford University, and the Hoover Institution Author-Name: Edoardo Grillo
Takuo Sugaya: Stanford University
Eray Turkel: Stanford University

No 293, "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno"

Abstract: We develop a model of electoral campaigns as dynamic contests in which two office-motivated candidates allocate their budgets over time to affect their odds of winning. We measure the candidates’ evolving odds of winning using a state variable that tends to decay over time, and we refer to it as the can- didates’ “relative popularity.” In our baseline model, the equilibrium ratio of spending by each candidate equals the ratio of their initial budgets; spending is independent of past realizations of relative popularity; and there is a positive relationship between the strength of decay in the popularity process and the rate at which candidates increase their spending over time as election day ap- proaches. We use this relationship to recover estimates of the perceived decay rate in popularity leads in actual U.S. subnational elections.

Keywords: campaigns; dynamic allocation problems; contests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economia.unipd.it/sites/economia.unipd.it/files/20220293.pdf (application/pdf)

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:pad:wpaper:0293

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in "Marco Fanno" Working Papers from Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Raffaele Dei Campielisi ().