Learning, voting and the information trap

Aleksander Berentsen (), Esther Bruegger () and Simon Loertscher ()

Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft

Abstract: We consider a median voter model with uncertainty about how the economy functions. The distribution of income is exogenously given and the provision of a public good is financed through a proportional tax. Voters and politicians do not know the true production function for the public good, but by using Bayes rule they can learn from experience. We show that the economy may converge to an inefficient policy where no further inference is possible so that the economy is stuck in an information trap.

Keywords: Learning; voting and the information trap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H10 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
Date: 2005-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vwl.unibe.ch/papers/dp/dp0516.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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ube:dpvwib:dp0516

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Silvia Glusstein-Gerber ().