Communication Among Voters Benefits the Majority Party
- Creators
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Palfrey, Thomas R.
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Pogorelskiy, Kirill
Abstract
How does communication among voters affect turnout? In a laboratory experiment, subjects, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining. Pre-play communication treatments, relative to the no communication control, are public communication (subjects exchange public messages through computers) and party communication (messages are public within one's own party). Communication benefits the majority party by increasing its turnout margin, hence its winning probability. Party communication increases turnout; public communication decreases total turnout with a low voting cost. With communication, there is no support for Nash equilibrium and limited consistency with correlated equilibrium.
Additional Information
© 2017 Royal Economic Society. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Economic Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Accepted: 15 August 2017; Published: 16 November 2017. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (SES-1426560) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (SES-1158) for financial support. We are grateful to Michael McBride and the laboratory assistants (Blake Allison, Tyler Boston and Alyssa Acre) at UC Irvine ESSL laboratory. We thank Tatiana Mayskaya for excellent research assistance. We thank Marina Agranov, Kim Border, Matthew Chao, Tatiana Coutto, Nehemia Geva, Kosuke Imai, John Ledyard, David K. Levine, Eugenia Nazrullaeva, Fabian Paetzel, Eugenio Proto, Molly Roberts, David Ronayne, Daniel Sgroi, Matthew Shum, Stefan Traub, Leeat Yariv, the Editor and two anonymous referees, whose comments significantly improved the article. We also thank seminar participants at Caltech, Princeton, Texas A&M, UCSD, UPenn, NRU-HSE, Warwick, Maastricht, U of Melbourne, UNSW, UTS, U Carlos III Madrid, and HSU Hamburg. This article was previously circulated as 'Voting with Communication: An Experimental Study of Correlated Equilibrium'.Attached Files
Published - ecoj12563.pdf
Supplemental Material - ecoj12563_supplement_files.zip
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 94779
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190418-081954322
- NSF
- SES-1426560
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- SES-1158
- Created
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2019-04-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field