 Voters' Private Valuation of Candidates' QualityDimitrios Xefteris and Enriqueta Aragonès No 858, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Abstract: We study a Downsian model of electoral competition, allowing different voters to have different and private valuations of candidates’quality. Unlike models in which the voters’valuations of candidates’ quality are common and common knowledge and which never admit pure strategy equilibria, in our setup we show existence of both converging and mildly diverging pure strategy equilibria. Perhaps more importantly, we uncover a non-monotonic (U-shaped) relationship between the extent of heterogeneity in voters’valuations and the maximum degree of equilibrium platform differentiation. In particular, we demonstrate that: a) a disagreement among voters on which candidate is better leads to a depoliticized vote, while an agreement on this issue leads to a politicized one; and b) as voters become more heterogeneous in how they evaluate candidates’quality, existence of pure strategy equilibria becomes more likely. Keywords: private information; Downsian model; advantaged candidate; platform differentiation (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:bge:wpaper:858 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.