Round-robin political tournaments: Abstention, truthful equilibria, and effective power

Roland Pongou and Bertrand Tchantcho

Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 130, issue C, 331-351

Abstract: A round-robin political tournament is an election format where multiple candidates contest in pairs, and votes are aggregated using a general rule to form a social ranking. We formalize this tournament as a strategic form game and provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which truthful voting is a Nash equilibrium. Building on this analysis, we study the concept of effective power, defined as a voter's ability to bring about a social ranking that maximizes his preferences. We show that the classical theories of political power do not translate into effective power in general. We then provide a full characterization of the classes of political tournaments and utility metrics for which these theories capture effective power. We offer both structural and behavioral interpretations of the findings, and derive practical implications for the design of political tournaments that are compatible with truth-telling.

Keywords: Round-robin political tournaments; Ranked voting; Hyper-preferences; Truthful equilibria; Effective power; Psychology; Political design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D02 D72 D90 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825621001056
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Round-Robin Political Tournaments: Abstention, Truthful Equilibria, and Effective Power (2021)
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:gamebe:v:130:y:2021:i:c:p:331-351

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.07.013

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().