a theory of voting equilibria a voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory generate an election result that justifies their perceptions voting equilibria always exist and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system we compare equilibria under the plurality rule approval voting and the borda system we consider a candidate positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three candidate races while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution we contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability

electoral competition in heterogeneous districts this paper considers a model of elections in which parties compete simultaneously for multiple districts i show that if districts are heterogeneous then a unique two party equilibrium exists under plurality rule in which further entry is deterred the equilibrium requires that parties choose noncentrist policy platforms and not converge to the ideal policy of the median voter these characteristics are consistent with empirical observation in contrast to those of single district models necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the equilibrium are then characterized and related to duverger s law the existence of multiple party equilibria in this environment is also considered

president perot or fundamentals of voting theory illustrated with the 1992 election different voting systems can lead to different election outcomeseven when voter preferences are held constant using the 1992 election as anexample it is shown how the outcome of every positional votesystem can be found similarly every possible cumulative andapproval vote outcome is shown multiple vote systems likeapproval and cumulative voting have disturbing properties usingthe 1992 election as illustration it is shown how a candidate whowins under every positional vote system who wins every pairwisevote i e is the condorcet winner and who has the most firstplace and least last place votes may nevertheless lose underapproval or cumulative voting similarly it is shown how acandidate who loses under every positional system who loses everypairwise vote i e is the condorcet loser and who has the leastfirst place and most last place votes may nevertheless win underapproval or cumulative voting

when are plurality rule voting games dominance solvable this paper studies the dominance solvability by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies of plurality rule voting games for any number of alternatives and at least four voters we find sufficient conditions for the game to be dominance solvable ds and not to be ds these conditions can be stated in terms of only one aspect of the game the largest proportion of voters who agree on which alternative is worst in a sequence of subsets of the original set of alternatives when the number of voters is large almost all games can be classified as either ds or not ds when the electorate is sufficiently replicated then if the game is ds a condorcet winner always exists and the outcome is the condorcet winner

strategic voting when participation is costly abstract we study a general multiparty model of plurality rule elections with costly participation and prove that strategic voting that is situations in which some voters abandon their most preferred alternative and vote strategically for the serious contender they dislike less may emerge in equilibrium just like when participation is costless compulsory palfrey 1989 this qualifies opposite claims made in more confined setups e g arzumanyan and polborn 2017 and establishes that duverger s psychological effect is present in a much larger set of cases than currently believed

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

expressive vs strategic voters an empirical assessment abstract leading theories of how voters choose between candidates are rooted in two very different paradigms with starkly different behavioral implications exploiting the incentive structure of germany s electoral system i develop a novel set of empirical tests that pit the canonical pivotal voter model against alternative accounts according to which individuals derive expressive utility from supporting their most preferred candidate the results show that neither paradigm can explain the most salient features of the data in addition the evidence suggests that voters cannot be neatly categorized into sincere and strategic types

expressive voting and electoral equilibrium there are two rival accounts of rational voting in the public choice tradition the mainstream instrumental account that sees the vote as a revelation of preference over possible electoral outcomes essentially analogous to a market choice and the expressive account that sees the vote as expressing support for one or other electoral options rather like cheering at a football match this paper attempts to lay out some of the implications of the expressive account of voting for the issue of who votes as well as for the nature of political equilibrium and to compare these implications with those derived from the instrumental account we also identify and discuss the alternative views of the domain of electoral politics associated with the instrumental and expressive accounts of voting and sketch a route towards the integration of expressive and instrumental ideas in the analysis of rational electoral politics

antitrust treatment of nonprofits should hospitals receive special care nonprofit hospitals receive favorable tax treatment in exchange for providing socially beneficial activities extending this rationale suggests that nonprofit hospital mergers should be evaluated differently than mergers of for profit hospitals because suppression of competition may also allow nonprofits to cross subsidize care for the poor using detailed california data we find no evidence that nonprofit hospitals are more likely than for profit hospitals to provide more charity care or offer unprofitable services in response to an increase in market power therefore we find no empirical justification for applying as some courts have suggested different antitrust standards for nonprofit hospitals jel i11 l1 l44

a hybrid algorithm for simultaneous scheduling of production and distribution in multi echelon structures this paper presents a dynamic programming algorithm for simultaneous determination of production batch sizes in an assembly network and distribution batch sizes in a conjoined distribution arborescent network the objective is to minimize average cost per period over an infinite horizon costs consist of processing costs at each node and linear holding costs for inventory final product demand rates may vary among the retail nodes but at each retail node the demand rate is assumed to be known constant and continuous all demand must be met backorders are not permitted the model can be used for a single product or for several products that are temporarily combined for distribution or for scheduling production in a system where several end products are produced from the same intermediate product as in some biochemical manufacturing processes

bargaining in legislatures bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures in our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting the model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard institution free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium

pivots versus signals in elections abstract we consider a two period model of elections in which voters have private information about their policy preferences a first period vote can have two types of consequences it may be pivotal in the first election and it provides a signal that affects candidates positions in the second election pivot events are exceedingly unlikely but when they occur the effect of a single vote is enormous in contrast vote totals always have some signaling effect but the effect of a single vote is small we investigate which effect pivot or signaling drives equilibrium voting behavior in large electorates

a theory of strategic voting in runoff elections abstract this paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic a model of three candidate runoff elections is presented and two new features are included the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous and many types of runoff systems are considered three main results emerge first runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes second a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist finally runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the condorcet loser jel c72 d72

why vote for losers voting theory generally concludes that in first past the post elections all votes should go to effective candidates duverger s law and parties should adopt a similar platform median voter theorem however such predictions are not always met in practice we show why divergence and vote dispersion is a natural outcome when a parties are opportunistic b there is uncertainty on the position of the median voter and c elections are repeated voting for losers increases the informational content of elections and may induce mainstream parties to relocate towards extremists as a result to maximize their probability of being elected they do not adopt median

a model of pre electoral coalition formation abstract in many countries three or more candidates compete against one another in single office elections i present a model of three candidates competing for a single office in which two candidates can form a coalition prior to the election a pre electoral coalition since the candidates are both policy and office motivated one candidate can incentivize the other candidate to withdraw his candidacy by choosing a joint policy platform i examine how electoral environments such as election rules ideological distance and pre election polls influence incentives to form pre electoral coalitions i find that pre electoral coalitions are more likely to form i in plurality elections than in two round runoff elections ii as the threshold for first round victory decreases in two round runoff elections iii as the two potential coalition partners ideological distance increases conditional on divided support and iv as the fraction of office value which is transferable increases moreover i analyze and compare voter welfare under plurality and the two round runoff rules

a dynamic duverger s law electoral systems promote strategic voting and affect party systems duverger les partis politiques 1951 proposed that plurality rule leads to bi partyism and proportional representation leads to multi partyism we show that in a dynamic setting these static effects also lead to a higher option value for existing minor parties under plurality rule so their incentive to exit the party system is mitigated by their future benefits from continued participation the predictions of our model are consistent with multiple cross sectional predictions on the comparative number of parties under plurality rule and proportional representation in particular there could be more parties under plurality rule than under proportional representation at any point in time however our model makes a unique time series prediction the number of parties under plurality rule should be less variable than under proportional representation we provide extensive empirical evidence in support of these results

endogenous minimum participation in international environmental agreements an experimental analysis almost all international environmental treaties require a minimum number of countries to ratify the treaty before it enters into force despite the wide spread use of this mechanism little is known about its effectiveness at facilitating cooperation we analyze an agreement formation game that includes an endogenously determined minimum participation constraint and then test the predictions using economic experiments we demonstrate theoretically that players will vote to implement an efficient coalition size as the membership requirement and this coalition will form experimental tests of the theory demonstrate that the minimum participation mechanism is highly effective at facilitating cooperation when efficiency requires the participation of all players however when efficiency requires only a subset of players to participate profitable coalitions are often deliberately blocked in light of our results it is possible that equity concerns can impede the formation of international agreements when membership requirements allow free riders

incentives to cultivate favored minorities under alternative electoral systems a simple model is used to compare under different electoral systems the incentives for candidates to create inequalities among otherwise homogeneous voters by making campaign promises that favor small groups rather than appealing equally to all voters in this game model each candidate generates offers for voters independently out of a distribution that is chosen by the candidate subject only to the constraints that offers must be nonnegative and have mean 1 symmetric equilibria with sincere voting are analyzed for two candidate elections and for multicandidate elections under rank scoring rules approval voting and single transferable vote voting rules that can guarantee representation for minorities in multiseat elections generate in this model the most severely unequal campaign promises

divided majority and information aggregation theory and experiment this paper studies theoretically and experimentally the properties of plurality and approval voting when a majority gets divided by information imperfections the majority faces two challenges aggregating information to select the best majority candidate and coordinating to defeat the minority candidate under plurality the majority cannot achieve both goals at once under approval voting it can welfare is strictly higher because some voters approve of both majority alternatives in the laboratory we find i strong evidence of strategic voting and ii superiority of approval voting over plurality finally subject behavior suggests the need to study equilibria in asymmetric strategies

hospital competition spillovers and provision of uncompensated care using data for california from 2005 until 2010 we investigate to what extent market competition and the presence of non profits in the area may play a role in equilibrium uncompensated care uc l

multicandidate elections aggregate uncertainty in the laboratory the rational voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions the paradox of voting and duverger s law are at odds with reality recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an arguably unrealistic assumption the absence of aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences in the electorate in this paper we propose direct empirical evidence of the effects of aggregate uncertainty in multicandidate elections adopting a theory based experimental approach we explore whether aggregate uncertainty indeed favors the emergence of non duverger s law equilibria in plurality elections our experimental results support the main theoretical predictions

the binary policy model abstract we introduce a model of electoral competition with office motivated candidates who are exogenously committed to particular positions on some issues while they choose positions for the remaining issues a position is majority efficient if a candidate cannot make a majority of the electorate better off given his fixed positions we characterize existence conditions for majority efficient positions the candidates fixed positions in our framework imply that only some voters are swing voters and we analyze how the distribution of swing voters determines whether candidates choose majority efficient positions we also analyze plurality and runoff elections with multiple candidates in our framework

theoretical comparisons of electoral systems abstract elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced a variety of electoral systems are reviewed cox s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates positions when the number of serious candidates is given duverger s law and its generalizations are discussed to predict the number of serious candidates duverger s law is interpreted as a statement about electoral barriers to entry and this idea is linked to the question of the effectiveness of democratic competition as a deterrent to political corruption the impact of post electoral bargaining on party structure in presidential and parliamentary systems is discussed

electoral thresholds as coordination devices this paper studies one person one vote parliamentary elections where voters care both about the winner of elections and about the composition of the parliament parties enter the parliament if and only if their vote share exceeds some predetermined threshold we show a that there generically exist equilibria in which all parties get a non degenerate vote share and perhaps more importantly b that the size of the electoral threshold acts as a coordination device which crucially affects the win prospects of the condorcet winner party in particular we argue that the win prospects of the condorcet winner party are decreasing in the size of the entry threshold

moderating political extremism single round versus runoff elections under plurality rule we compare single round versus runoff elections under plurality rule allowing for partly endogenous party formation under runoff elections the number of political candidates is larger but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility is smaller because the bargaining power of the political extremes is reduced compared to single round elections the predictions on the number of candidates and on policy volatility are confirmed by evidence from a regression discontinuity design in italy where cities above 15 000 inhabitants elect the mayor with a runoff system while those below hold single round elections jel c78 d72

the role of hospital competition on treatment expenditure and outcome evidence from stroke and cardiac treatment in taiwan this article examines whether market competition affects treatment expenditure and health outcomes of stroke and cardiac treatment in taiwan our measure of treatment expenditure is the hospital expenditure paid at the index admission short term and the sum of inpatient and outpatient expenditures paid in the subsequent year long term our measure of health outcome is the probability of death in 1 and 12 months after the hospital s discharge our measure of competition follows the method developed by kessler and mcclellan that calculates the herfindal index based on the predicted patient flows using exogenous variables e g traveling distance to hospitals using data of patients hospitalized for new stroke and cardiac treatment between 1997 and 2001 in taiwan we find that an increase of market competition results in an insignificant impact on a patient s mortality in terms of treatment expenditure our results indicate that hospitals facing more competition incur higher expenditures either the short or long term expenditure finally we find evidence showing that an increase of treatment expenditure at admission is due to a raise of length of stay and treatment intensity per day as well as the usage of expensive equipment jel i11 l13 l41

elections with limited information a fulfilled expectations model using contemporaneous poll and endorsement data as information sources a one dimensional model of two candidate elections under asymmetric information is theoretically developed and experimentally tested candidates do not know voter utility functions and most voters are uninformed about candidate policy positions a fulfilled expectations equilibrium is defined using poll and endorsement data as information sources it is proved that with any positive fraction of informed voters any equilibrium extracts all available information all participants voters and candidates alike act as if they were fully informed for fixed candidate strategies a dynamic is given for convergence to voter equilibrium and this process is shown to imply a bandwagon effect

analysis of democratic institutions structure conduct and performance t s ahe structure of a democratic political system consists of the offices that politicians may seek the constitutional powers associated with these offices and the procedures by which candidates are elected to these offices these structures together form a complex incentive system for politicians determining what kinds of political decisions and strategies will be rewarded thus the constitutional structure of a democracy may influence the conduct of its politicians and the performance of its government in this way political theory confronts a set of questions that have much in common with the classic economic questions of structure conduct and performance in industrial organization this paper develops this economic perspective on political theory as a guide to some problems and directions of current research economic and political interpretations of a classic model

platform selection in the lab abstract emerging literature explores experimental platform selection games these games converge rapidly on the superior platform under a wide range of conditions we replicate the remarkable results of hossain and morgan 2009 in which such a game tips almost perfectly to the superior platform next we show that platform coordination fails when seemingly innocent increases in out of equilibrium payoffs are introduced the inflated payoffs keep the best reply structure unchanged and do not influence players security levels our design allows control for the explanatory force of risk dominance we find that equilibrium selection theory is unable to account for coordination failure while observed behavior is consistent with non rational learning furthermore and contrary to the literature we find that efficiency suffers when an inferior platform is granted initial monopoly

would letting people vote for multiple candidates yield policy moderation abstract we investigate whether letting people vote for multiple candidates would yield policy moderation we do so in a setting that takes three key features of elections into account namely strategic voting endogenous candidacy and policy motivation on the part of the candidates we consider two classes of voting rules one class consists of the voting rules where each voter casts several equally weighed votes for the different candidates the other class consists of the voting rules where each voter rank orders the candidates we identify conditions under which these voting rules yield policy moderation we also show that these voting rules may yield policy extremism instead of policy moderation if one or several of the conditions is not satisfied finally we find that amongst these voting rules the extent of policy moderation is maximal under the borda count if we consider only equilibria where all candidates are serious contenders however this result does not carry over to spoiler equilibria where approval voting can yield more moderate policy outcomes than the borda count

get rid of unanimity rule the superiority of majority rules with veto power we study unanimous decision making under incomplete information we argue that unanimous decision rules are not all equivalent we show that majority rules with veto power are i pareto superior to commonly used unanimous rules and ii ex ante efficient in a broad class of situations

the effect of physician board membership on uncompensated care provision previous studies indicate that nonprofit and for profit hospitals provide comparable levels of uncompensated care when taking into account their sizes this evidence suggests that for profit hospitals extract some indirect benefit when providing uncompensated care our article investigates how physician board membership affects uncompensated care provision with data for hospitals in california from 1997 to 2010 we estimate a fixed effect model where uncompensated care is a function of physician board membership other board attributes as well as hospital characteristics our results indicate that physician board membership in for profit hospitals relates positively with uncompensated care provision prior evidence such as goldstein and ward 2004 and molinari et al 1995 has shown that involving physicians in strategic decisions improves hospitals financial performance our results reinforce the notion that having physicians in leadership or strategic positions benefits for profit hospitals in

optimal two stage lot sizing and inventory batching policies abstract this paper extends previous studies of two stage lot sizing problems with finite production rates we develop various lot sizing and inventory batching i e operation unit batching oub and unit unit batching uub models under different system characteristics and lot sizing and inventory policies the analysis of the optimality of the lot size ratio between the two stages reveals 1 that both non increasing and non decreasing lot sizing policies can be optimal in both oub and uub 2 that a non integer lot size ratio can be optimal in oub and 3 that an integer lot size ratio is always optimal in uub we present a simple easy to implement optimal solution approach to the two stage lot sizing and inventory batching problem along with examples

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

evaluation of capital costs in a multi level inventory system by means of the annuity stream principle abstract in this paper some results obtained from applying the annuity stream principle for evaluating capital tied up in inventory and work in progress and presented this principle departs from the cashflows associated with the production inventory processes considered in contrast to traditional procedures by which the inventory value is determined from physical stock evaluated at costs incurred to date in many situations it appears that the traditional procedure will underestimate the amount of capital tied up in production in this paper the two principles are applied to a multi level inventory system and the capital cost expressions and optimal order quantities are compared

does competition between hospitals improve the quality of care hospital death rates and the nhs internal market payer driven competition has been widely advocated as a means of increasing efficiency in health care markets the 1990s reforms to the uk health service followed this path we examine whether competition led to better outcomes for patients as measured by death rates after treatment following heart attacks using data that until 1999 was not publicly available in any form on hospital level death rates we find that the relationship between competition and quality of care appears to be negative greater competition is associated with higher death rates controlling for patient mix and other observed characteristics of the hospital and the catchment area for its patients however the estimated impact of competition is small jel classification i1 l8 h4

selecting the condorcet winner single stage versus multi stage voting rules in this paper i study elections where voters are strategic i find that the commonly used voting rules such as plurality rule majority rule approval voting and single transferable vote do not always select the condorcet winner and suffer from multiple equilibria multi stage voting rules offer a way to get around this problem i introduce two voting rules multi stage runoff and the nominate two rule that select the condorcet winner as the unique equilibrium outcome under mild conditions i show that a third class of voting rules binary voting trees also select the condorcet winner

communication and voting in multi party elections an experimental study we investigate communication and costly voting in multi party election experiments turnout is consistently lower across electorate communication as compared with restricted communication within parties voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication but more likely to start deliberation by stating their first preference when unrestricted distributions of earnings are more inequitable when communication is restricted and the candidate preferred by the minority of voters is more likely to win we also find that even restricted communication significantly increases participation and strategic voting by swing voters above and beyond induced identity effects

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

manipulation through political endorsements abstract we study elections with three candidates under plurality voting a candidate is a condorcet loser if the majority of the voters place that candidate at the bottom of their preference rankings we first show that a condorcet loser might win the election in a three way race next we introduce to the model an endorser who has private information about the true probability distribution of the preferences of the voters observable endorsements facilitate coordination among voters who may otherwise split their votes and lead to the victory of the condorcet loser when the endorser has an ideological bias towards one of the candidates the coordination impact of endorsements remains unaltered moreover the endorser successfully manipulates the outcome of the election in favor of his bias even if his ideological bias is known by the voters the results are true for any endorsement cost and any magnitude of bias as long as the electorate is large enough

pandering and electoral competition abstract we study an election with two perfectly informed candidates voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them voters elect one of the candidates effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates we explore under which conditions candidates always propose the voters optimal policy the model is extended to include strategic voting policy motivated candidates imperfectly informed candidates and heterogeneous preferences

state mandated benefits and employer provided health insurance abstract one popular explanation for the low rate of employee health insurance coverage is the presence of numerous state regulations which mandate that group health insurance plans must include certain benefits by raising the minimum cost of providing any health insurance coverage these mandated benefits make it impossible for firms which would have desired to offer minimal health insurance at a low cost to do so i use data on insurance coverage among employees in small firms to investigate whether this problem is an important cause of employee non insurance i find that mandates have little effect on the rate of insurance coverage this finding is robust to a variety of specifications of the regulations i also find that this lack of an effect may be because mandates are not binding since most firms appear to offer these benefits even in the absence of regulation

strategic voting equilibria under the single nontransferable vote previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single member districts i shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system what appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the m 1 rule according to which strategic voting in m seat districts produces exactly m 1 vote getting candidates in equilibrium any others having their support totally undercut this result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for reed s recent extension of duverger s law to the japanese case the model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the m 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium i test these hypotheses with japanese data finally the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts i use japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting

the runner up effect exploiting regression discontinuity designs in brazilian indian and canadian first past the post elections we document that second place candidates are substantially more likely than close third place candidates to run in and win subsequent elections since both candidates lost the election and had similar electoral performance this is the effect of being labeled the runner up selection into candidacy is unlikely to explain the effect on winning subsequent elections and we find no effect of finishing in third place versus fourth place we develop a simple model of strategic coordination by voters that rationalizes the results and provides further predictions that are supported by the data

tactical coordination in plurality electoral systems simple plurality election systems commonly known as first past the post are often associated with the dominance of two political parties such systems tend to reward leading parties with a disproportionately large number of seats the mechanical effect and provoke tactical voting where voters switch away from trailing parties the psychological effect we view tactical voting as a coordination problem a group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party such as the conservatives in recent uk elections and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger such as labour or the liberal democrats in order to do this crucially voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played tactical voting is a global game we show that in this setting voters will only partially coordinate furthermore tactical voting exhibits negative feedback tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction we calibrate our model and apply it to the uk general election of 1997 throughout england we find that the mechanical and psychological effects tend to offset each other tactical voting serves to reverse the conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of preferences

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

voter uncertainty and failure of duverger s law an empirical analysis real world simple plurality elections rarely bear out the strong duvergerian prediction that in equilibrium only two competitors receive votes recent advances in strategic voting theory demonstrate that voter uncertainty about competitors true support levels in the constituency may lead to limited strategic voting and hence incomplete desertion of trailing parties this is the first attempt to estimate empirically the impact of uncertainty on incentives to vote strategically calibrating a model of strategic voting to voting results from simple plurality elections in german constituencies it is found that strategic voters operate under high levels of uncertainty these results support the proposition that uncertainty about party support impedes formation of duvergerian equilibria

antitrust in the not for profit sector abstract although the not for profit sector contributes greatly to aggregate output in many industries there has been little explicit analysis of the economic consequences of applying antitrust policy in this sector despite the differences between for profit and nonprofit firms stressed in conventional economic analyses u s antitrust law generally does not distinguish between these two organizational forms this paper argues that under plausible assumptions and with possible exceptions the same incentives to restrain trade exist in the nonprofit sector as in the for profit sector altruistic firms benefit from exploiting market power even when they would price below cost in the absence of competition in fact the efficiency gains from antitrust policy may often be larger for nonprofit firms therefore a policy of promoting competition has social value even when producers motivations are altruistic the argument for uniform antitrust treatment of the two sectors extends to exemptions from antitru

voting as communicating this paper develops a model where voters trade off two different motives when deciding how to vote they care about current decision making they are strategic but they also care about communicating their views about their most preferred candidate so as to influence future elections by influencing other voters opinion and or party positioning in effect voters in this model are intermediate between strategic and sincere voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates this allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication e g by opting for 2 round systems rather than 1 round systems

comparing electoral systems a geometric analysis this paper constructs a game theoretic model of elections inalternative electoral systems with three or four candidates each electoral system specifies how the platforms of thecandidates and their scores give rise to an outcome whengeometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can competeagainst each other for victory a pivot probability isassociated to that pair each voter is rational and picks thecandidate that maximizes her expected utility which resultsfrom the balancing of her preferences and beliefs about thepivot probabilities candidate positioning is endogenous andthe result of a nash game the possible equilibria arecomputed for plurality and runoff majority systems

centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems this paper investigates how electoral laws affect the position taking incentives of parties and candidates it seeks to extend the finding presented in the classical median voter theorem to a wide class of electoral systems or to show the limits of such extension the factors examined are the district magnitude the electoral formula the number of votes each voter is allowed to cast whether voters can cumulate their votes and whether voters can partially abstain i suggest a crude division of electoral systems into those producing predominantly centripetal incentives and those producing predominantly centrifugal incentives among the factors found to produce centripetal incentives at least in noncumulative systems are the following increases in the number of votes per voter outlawry of partial abstention and decreases in the district magnitude in systems allowing the cumulation of votes matters are a bit different

factors impacting market concentration of not for profit hospitals we attempt to identify and evaluate the association between key characteristics of not for profit np hospitals and market concentration as measured by the herfindahl hirschman index using data available from the american hospital association the centers for medicare and medicaid services and the internal revenue service form 990 our goal is to provide decision support to policy makers on factors that contribute to market competitiveness which has been linked to improvements in efficiency costs and access to health care we find that contributions are positively associated with market concentration this could indicate that well run np hospitals that deliver on their mission are rewarded both financially through increased contributions as well as with increased market share we also find that a higher percentage of medicare patients is positively correlated with market concentration i e reduces the competitiveness of the np market this could be explained by the fact that medicare reimbursement rates are generally lower than those paid by private insurers approximately 80 thus hospitals might not necessarily choose to operate in areas with high medicare populations further median income is negatively associated with market concentration one explanation for this effect could be the fact that a population with a higher median income is in a better position to pay for services making them attractive to hospitals as a potential market finally we find that the presence of managers with voting rights on the boards of directors has no significant impact

public health insurance and medical treatment the equalizing impact of the medicaid expansions abstract we investigate the impact of expanding public health insurance on the medical treatment received by women at childbirth using vital statistics data on every birth in the us over the 1987 1992 period the effects of insurance status on treatment are identified using the tremendous variation in eligibility for public insurance coverage under the medicaid program over this period among low education mothers who were largely uninsured before being made eligible for medicaid eligibility for this program was associated with significant increases in the use of a variety of obstetric procedures among women with more education however there is a countervailing effect on procedure use most of these women had private insurance before becoming medicaid eligible and some may have been crowded out onto the public program moving from insurance which reimburses medical care more generously to insurance with much less generous reimbursement this movement was accompanied by reductions in procedure use thus on net the medicaid expansions had an equalizing effect increasing the treatment intensity of the previously uninsured while lowering it among the previously insured

note comments on the optimality in optimal and system myopic policies for multi echelon production inventory assembly systems schwarz and schrage s model assumes that for optimal policies in a multi echelon production inventory system the lot size of a stage must not be larger than that of a predecessor stage as lots move from the initial stage to the final stage examples in this note illustrate that set up costs and inventory holding costs may be such that optimal inventory policies exist when smaller lot sizes are produced intermittently at a stage with an overlap to feed the continuous production of a larger lot size at the next stage also an example shows that in contrast with another assumption in their model optimality does not always require that the lot size at each stage be an integer multiple of the lot size at the successor stage

rational voting and candidate entry under plurality rule we analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features first rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry as well as location second voters in our model are strategically rational that is they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate given these assumptions all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voter s ideal point this result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

stability and coordination in duverger s law a formal model of preelection polls and strategic voting this paper investigates the dynamics of the wasted vote phenomenon and duverger s law i construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate the results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election specifically i show that in a bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes in the limit these equilibria require extreme coordination however and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the duvergerian equilibria thus non duvergerian equilibria are unstable while two party equilibria are not in addition i describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a duvergerian outcome

robust satisficing voting why are uncertain voters biased towards sincerity the modern theory of voting usually regards voters as expected utility maximizers this implies that voters define subjective probabilities and utilities for different outcomes of the elections in real life these probabilities and utilities are often highly uncertain so a robust choice immune to erroneous assumptions may be preferred we show that a voter aiming to satisfice his expected utility rather than maximize it may present a bias for sincere voting as opposed to strategic voting this may explain previous results which show that strategic voting is not as prevalent as would be expected if all voters were expected utility maximizers

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

sequential voting in large elections with multiple candidates abstract i analyze strategic voting incentives in large elections with three candidates when voting takes place sequentially voters have perfect information about their private preferences but do not know the distribution from which other voters preferences are drawn if a candidate finishes last in an early voting round voters deduce that this candidate is likely to be less popular amongst the remaining voters and the remaining voters almost always have an incentive to stop voting for this candidate by contrast sincere voting equilibria can exist under either simultaneous voting or an early voting round of sequential voting without knife edge assumptions

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

voting as a lottery supermajorities have their advantage as well as their disadvantage they provide an hedge against being in the minority but they make being in the majority less likely we characterize this trade oand compute the most preferred majority threshold the relevant parameters are voting power risk aversion and pessimism people who feel powerful prefer low thresholds high thresholds are preferred by risk averters or by those who are pessimistic about being in the majority further we study constitutional agreements on the voting rule members of the constituent assembly are heterogeneous in the parameters above we show that weak and minority members succeed in pushing forward on high and protective rules

comparing constitutions cohesion and distribution in legislatures abstract this paper summarizes our recent work on analyzing the effects of constitutional features on legislative outcomes and voting behavior it illustrates how a general framework may be used to examine the effects of one of the principal features of parliamentary democracy the vote of confidence procedure we show how the confidence procedure creates incentives for governing coalitions to vote cohesively on policy issues that might otherwise split them as a consequence legislative majorities in parliamentary democracies behave in a more disciplined fashion and capture more of the legislative rents than in non parliamentary settings

the number of parties as a function of heterogeneity and electoral system what determines the number of parties in a national assembly previous work has emphasized either sociopolitical heterogeneity or electoral system permissiveness or brought them together on an empirical basis here an equation is developed that satisfies two theoretical boundary conditions and expresses the effective number of assembly parties n in terms of both the number of politicized issue dimensions i and effective magnitude m of electoral system n i 6m 15 1 actually depending on circumstances any of the three variables could become the dependent one affected by the two others empirical evidence is presented based on lijphart s 1984 data on 22 stable regimes

the effect of competitive pressure on charity hospital responses to price shopping in california abstract since higher charges to private patients are a major source of financing for hospital care to the uninsured increased price shopping by private payers may mean that hospitals are less able to provide such care i study the effect of increased price shopping on california hospital markets over the 1984 1988 period i find that there was a large fall in net private revenues and net income in the least concentrated hospital markets in the state after the advent of price shopping perhaps as a result care to the uninsured fell dramatically in these markets as well relative to more concentrated markets

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates