Candidate Positioning and Entry in a Political Competition

Martin Osborne

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: I first show that if there are more than two potential candidates in the Hotelling-Downs model of the simultaneous choice of positions by politicians then an equilibrium fails to exist in a wide range of situations. Subsequently I study a temporal model in which candidates are free to act whenever they wish. For the case of three potential candidates I find that in every equilibrium exactly one candidate enters. There is always an equilibrium in which the position chosen by the entrant is the median; the only other possibility is that the position chosen is far from the median.

JEL-codes: C72 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 1992-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Candidate Positioning and Entry in a Political Competition (1993)
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