 Multidimensional electoral competition between differentiated candidatesGames and Economic Behavior, 2017, vol. 105, issue C, 112-121 Abstract: It is known that multidimensional Downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters' bliss points are imposed (Plott, 1967). This paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing candidates are differentiated. That is, candidates strategically decide positions only in some of the n dimensions while in the rest of them their positions are assumed to be fixed. These fixed dimensions may be viewed as candidates' immutable characteristics (race, religion, culture, etc.). We find that for any distribution of voters' bliss points, a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies is guaranteed to exist if candidates are sufficiently differentiated –if in the fixed dimensions their positions are sufficiently different. This is true even if there exists a unique fixed dimension and candidates are flexible in all other n−1 dimensions. Keywords: Electoral competition; Multidimensional model; Equilibrium existence; Differentiated candidates (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:105:y:2017:i:c:p:112-121 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2017.07.005 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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