Opportunistic timing and manipulation in Australian Federal Elections
Dharma Lesmono,
Elliot Tonkes and
Kevin Burrage
European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 192, issue 2, 677-691
Abstract:
In many parliamentary systems, election timing is an important decision made by governments in order to maximize their expected remaining life in power. Governments can also introduce policy or economic actions to enhance their popular standing and thus their chance of being re-elected. On the other hand, an oppositions' natural objective is to gain power, and they will also apply controls through their own policies to reduce the governments' chance of being re-elected. In this paper we employ a dynamic programming approach to determine the optimal timing for governments and oppositions to best utilize their limited resources. At each decision branch, the optimal control is interpreted as a Nash-Cournot equilibrium of a zero-sum political game which, in certain states, admits mixed strategy solutions. We perform a case study on the Australian Federal Election for House of Representatives.
Keywords: OR; in; government; Dynamic; programming; Game; theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(07)01041-7
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:ejores:v:192:y:2009:i:2:p:677-691
Access Statistics for this article
European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati
More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().