The Swing Voter's Curse in the Laboratory

Marco Battaglini, Thomas Palfrey and Rebecca Morton

No 5458, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

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 the size of the electorate, the distribution of preferences, and other theoretically relevant parameters. The design varies the share of partisan voters and the prior belief about a 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 naïve decision-theoretic strategies. The voters act as if they are aware of the swing voter?s curse and adjust their behaviour to compensate. While the compensation is not complete and there is some heterogeneity in individual behaviour, we find that aggregate outcomes, such as efficiency, turnout, and margin of victory, closely track the theoretical predictions.

Keywords: Swing voter's curse; Voting behaviour; Information aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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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 (2007)
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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