Information Revelation in Constant-Sum Games: Elections and Beyond

Navin Kartik, Francesco Squintani and Katrin Tinn

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Do elections aggregate the private information of office-motivated candidates? Our answer stems from a general result for two-player constant-sum Bayesian games with type-independent payoffs. Under a "completeness" statistical condition, every "identifiable" equilibrium is an ex-post equilibrium. Applied to Downsian elections, the ex-post property implies a sharp bound on information aggregation: equilibrium voter welfare is at best equal to the efficient use of a single candidate's information. In canonical specifications, politicians may "anti-pander" (overreact to their information), whereas some degree of pandering would be socially beneficial. We discuss other applications of the ex-post result.

Date: 2024-06, Revised 2026-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.17084 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2406.17084

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().