Rational Ignorance and Voting Behavior

Cesar Martinelli ()

No 505, Working Papers from Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM

Abstract: We model a two-alternative election in which voters may acquire information about which is the best alternative for all voters. Voters differ in their cost of acquiring information. We show that as the number of voters increases, the fraction of voters who acquire information declines to zero. However, if the support of the cost distribution is not bounded away from zero, there is an equilibrium with some information acquisition for arbitrarily large electorates. This equilibrium dominates in terms of welfare any equilibrium without information acquisition--even though generally there is too little information acquisition with respect to an optimal strategy profile.

JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ict, nep-knm and nep-pol
Date: Written 2005-10
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Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.itam.mx/pub/academico/inves/martinelli/05-05.pdf First version, 2005

Related works:
Working Paper: Rational Ignorance and Voting Behavior (2005)
Journal Article: Rational ignorance and voting behavior (2007)
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