How to win a large election

Michael Mandler

Games and Economic Behavior, 2013, vol. 78, issue C, 44-63

Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of a campaign trying to win an election when facing aggregate uncertainty, where agentsʼ voting probabilities are uncertain. Even a small amount of uncertainty will in a large electorate eliminate many of counterintuitive results that arise when voting probabilities are known. In particular, a campaign that can affect the voting probabilities of a fraction of the electorate should maximize the expected difference between its candidateʼs and the opposing candidateʼs share of the fractionʼs potential vote. When a campaign can target only finitely many voters, maximization of the same objective function remains optimal if a convergence condition is satisfied. When voting probabilities are certain, this convergence condition obtains only at knife-edge combinations of parameters, but when voting probabilities are uncertain the condition is necessarily satisfied.

Keywords: Elections; Expected margin of victory; Law of large numbers; Local limit theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825612001376
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:gamebe:v:78:y:2013:i:c:p:44-63

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2012.09.005

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

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