pareto improving campaign finance policy this paper argues that campaign finance policy in the form of contribution limits and matching public financing can be pareto improving even under very optimistic assumptions concerning the role of campaign advertising and the rationality of voters the optimistic assumptions are that candidates use campaign contributions to convey truthful information to voters about their qualifications for office and that voters update their beliefs rationally on the basis of the information they have seen the argument also assumes that campaign contributions are provided by interest groups and that candidates can offer to provide policy favors to attract higher contributions

expectations about voter choices a comment the only essential differences in the examples analyzed above are in the assumptions that are used to derive or directly specify the choice behavior that the candidates expect from any given voter conditional on his utility function when the central behavioral assumption from the traditional models was used the equilibrium was a median outcome a conclusion directly analogous to what happens in the corresponding unidimensional traditional voting models when the central behavioral assumptions from the probabilistic voting model developed in coughlin and nitzan 1981 were used the equilibrium was at the maximum of the expected log utility function a conclusion directly analogous to what happens in the model in coughlin and nitzan 1981 indeed it was only when the corresponding assumptions from ledyard 1984 were used i e the particular assumptions that ledyard used to derive the choice behavior that the candidates expect from any given voter conditional on his utility function that the conclusions were substantially different from the conclusions derived from earlier models this reflects the important role these assumptions play in making ledyard s conclusions about candidate strategies substantially different from earlier results in the literature on spatial models of elections

us and german consumer preferences for ground beef packaged under a modified atmosphere different regulations different behaviour new technologies in food processing can provide advantages to consumers and producers but often the technologies are applied in different country specific regulatory climates modified atmosphere packaging extends the shelf life of fresh meat and with the inclusion of carbon monoxide stabilizes colour these packaging technologies can be used in the us and europe although a modified atmosphere package that includes carbon monoxide is allowed only in the us this study applies choice experiments to analyse preferences of us and german consumers towards the meat attributes enhanced by the packaging results show that longer shelf life is preferred in the us as long as the technology is understandable consumers in both countries have clear preferences for cherry red meat colour however providing information on the use of carbon monoxide in the packaging decreases us consumers willingness to pay and increases some german consumers willingness to pay

strategic extremism why republicans and democrats divide on religious values party platforms differ sharply from one another especially on issues with religious content such as abortion or gay marriage given the high return to attracting the median voter why do vote maximizing politicians take extreme positions in this paper we find that strategic extremism depends on an intensive margin where politicians want to induce their core constituents to vote or make donations and the ability to target political messages toward those core constituents our model predicts that the political relevance of religious issues is highest when around one half of the voting population attends church regularly using data from across the world and within the united states we indeed find a nonmonotonic relationship between religious extremism and religious attendance

shaming the corporation the social production of targets and the anti sweatshop movement as social movements co evolve with changes in states and markets it is crucial to examine how they make particular kinds of actors into focal points for the expression of grievances and the demand for rights but researchers often bracket the question of why some kinds of organizations are more likely than others to become targets of social movement pressure we theorize the social production of targets by social movements rejecting a simple reflection model to focus on configurations of power and vulnerability that shape repertoires of contention empirically we extend structural accounts of global commodity chains and cultural accounts of markets to analyze the production of targets in the case of the anti sweatshop movement of the 1990s using a longitudinal firm level dataset and unique data on anti sweatshop activism we identify factors that attracted social movement pressure to particular companies firms power and positions strongly shaped their likelihood of becoming targets of anti swea

competing for endorsements endorsements are a simple language for communication between interest group leaders and group members the members who share policy concerns may not perfectly understand where their interests lie on certain issues if their leaders cannot fully explain the issues they can convey some information by endorsing a candidate or party when interest groups endorse legislative contenders the candidates may compete for backing policies may favor special interests at the expense of the general public the authors examine the conditions under which parties compete for endorsements the extent to which policy outcomes are skewed and the normative properties of the political equilibria

shirking and sorting in a political market with finite lived politicians this paper analyzes principal agent slack in the context of a political market composed of voters challengers and incumbents the introduction of a last period via finite livedness in combination with voters imperfect information about politicians preferences causes time varying shirking behavior on the part of politicians political markets eventually sort out those politicians with significantly deviant policy preferences potentially providing a solution to the last period problem and enabling politicians to make credible commitments in the extreme sorting can insure that it is not worthwhile for potential shirkers to run for office a systematic relationship between political shirking and number of terms in office may exist and depends on how quickly sorting takes place we show that evidence of little if any shirking is quite consistent with politicians having diverse and strongly held policy preferences in addition if sorting is a significant feature of political markets cross sectional studies will tend to oversample little and non shirking politicians compared to longitudinal studies reinterpretations of existing empirical work are also discussed

electoral politics interest groups and the size of government electoral politics interest groups and the size of government i introduction interest groups have been considered main actors in the political drama for some time now by political scientists as in bentley 1908 schattschneider 1935 and truman 1951 and more recently by economist also such as olson 1965 and stigler 1975 despite the widespread consensus on their importance there have been few formal attempts to analyze their impact on public policies thus borooah and van der ploeg 1983 90 were moved to declare that theory based on the importance of different interest groups is badly needed in economics an important exception is becker s 1983 1985 analysis of interest group competition becker draws insights about the nature of the trade offs that occur when interest groups compete for political influence but becker consciously avoids incorporating into his model political institutions such as voting voting rules and candidates 1983 391 4 1985 330 rather he assumes that the political process operates as a veil through which the underlying strengths and demands of various interest groups are revealed this paper takes a different tack but one complementary to becker s approach the analysis is based on an explicit model of the political process that includes interest groups in the model interest group influence is a potential supply of votes for which parties or candidates compete each party seeks a winning coalition of voters and thus engages in implicit logrolling tullock 1959 572 an equilibrium exists in the competition for the support of interest groups and the nature of the equilibrium electoral platforms is identified below embodied in the characterization of the equilibria is a set of parameters that can be said to measure the strengths of the various interest groups and which enable one to identify how candidates change their policy positions in response to a change in the strength of an interest group it is therefore possible to analyze simultaneously the existence of an electoral equilibrium its nature including its normative properties and changes in equilibrium due to shifts in the balance of forces between competing groups 1 in contrast to becker 1983 1985 these analytical features are not assumed outright rather they are based on an underlying model of elections the theoretical underpinnings for this model are discussed in section ii interest groups are often alleged to be responsible in part for recent increases in the size of government in western democracies 2 therefore in sections iii and iv a model of the political process is used to study the impact of an increase in the influence of a particular interest group on government size in the simple models of the public sector considered here increasing group influence per se does not cause the size of the government to increase but an increase in the government s size does result when i there are constraints on the government s ability to change tax shares in response to a shift in group power or ii there is a publicly provided good which benefits one untaxed group and that group s sole concern with government policy is to maximize the amount of the good that it gets the paper concludes by considering some of the normative implications of the results ii interest groups in the electoral process there are two sets of actors in the model parties and interest groups and two sets of relationships which must be analyzed the relationships between interest groups and the parties and the relationship between the parties themselves with respect to the first question this paper investigates the determinants of each interest group s influence on the platforms proposed by the parties with respect to the second it explores whether the competition for votes between the parties produces an equilibrium and if so what its properties are

economists capitalists and the making of globalization north american free trade in comparative historical perspective why did globalization happen current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s such accounts disagree however about the key actors involved this article provides a reconciliation showing how two different combinations of actors and two different political economic pathways have led to globalization in recent decades in developed countries mobilization by business has been central elsewhere technocrats both constrained and empowered by international finance have pursued globalization more independently of business in both contexts economists technical authority has helped legitimate liberalization despite the limited diffusion of their ideas the article validates and elaborates this model using a comparative historical study of how the united states canada and mexico proposed negotiated and ratified agreements for free trade in north america

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

the limits of political compromise debt ceilings and political turnover we study the desirability of limits on the public debt and of political turnover in an economy where incumbents have an incentive to set public expenditures above the socially optimal level due to rent seeking motives parties alternate in office and cannot commit to future policies but they can forge a political compromise where each party curbs excessive spending when in office if it expects future governments to do the same in contrast to the received literature we find that strict limits on government borrowing can exacerbate political economy distortions by making a political compromise unsustainable this tends to happen when political turnover is limited conversely a tight limit on the public debt fosters a compromise that yields the efficient outcome if political turnover is vigorous our analysis thus suggests that to sustain good economic policies a society needs to restrict either the extent of political turnover or the ability of governments to issue debt but not both

the role of party reputation in the formation of policy abstract this paper shows that a party can credibly establish a platform more moderate than the ideology of its members and thereby raise the probability that the party s nominee wins the election a lame duck incumbent optimally implements his party s platform in order to maintain his party s reputation for having a moderate platform this increases the likelihood that his party retains power when candidates credibly locate themselves in policy space via this mechanism we show that if candidates are sufficiently impatient then their policies are bounded away from one another the policy convergence result is not robust

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

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

political parties and political shirking using ada roll call voting scores for the 1947 2006 period i find that senators shirk in their last term the degree of shirking is limited by political parties which constrain the politician in his last term and varies by post senate career choices the results highlight the importance of political parties in the repeated game that is electoral politics

consumers willingness to pay for the color of salmon a choice experiment with real economic incentives in most retail markets sellers post the price and consumers choose which products to buy we designed an experimental market with posted prices to investigate consumers willingness to pay for the color of salmon salmon fillets varying in color and price were displayed in twenty choice scenarios in each scenario the participants chose which of two salmon fillets they wanted to buy to induce real economic incentives each participant drew one binding scenario the participants then had to buy the salmon fillet they had chosen in their binding scenario the choice data were analyzed with a mixed logit model

testing limits to policy reversal evidence from indian privatizations abstract we examine the effect of regime change on privatization in the 2004 indian election the pro reform bjp was unexpectedly defeated by a less reformist coalition stock prices of government controlled companies that had been slated for privatization by the bjp dropped 3 5 relative to private firms government controlled companies that were under study for possible privatization fell 7 5 relative to private firms this is consistent with investor belief of a point of no return where advanced reforms are more difficult to reverse further analysis suggests that layoffs combined with the privatization announcement served as a credible commitment to privatize

an overlapping generations model of electoral competition this paper presents a dynamic model of political competition between two parties with different policy preferences a party is explicitly modeled as a sequence of overlapping generations of candidates all of whom face finite decision horizons in general there is a conflict between the interests of the individual policymakers and those of the party which includes subsequent generations of candidates we characterize this conflict and suggest a scheme of intergenerational transfers within the party which can resolve or mitigate this conflict the paper shows how the overlapping generations model can be usefully applied to the political arena this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

credibility and policy convergence in a two party system with rational voters the traditional approach to modeling political parties behavior based upon the contribution of anthony downs 1957 assumes that the parties unique objective is to win elections thus they maximize their popularity the crucial implication of this assumption for a two party system is that if the two parties have the same information about voters preferences full convergence of policies results from electoral competition this is the crucial implication of the median voter theorem more generally it may be argued that different parties are motivated differently because they represent different constituencies parties may not care only about winning elections per se but also about the quality of the policies resulting from an election in this case the candidates of the two parties view winning an election not only as a goal per se but also as a means of implementing a better policy for their respective constituencies this paper shows that electoral competitions imply dynamic inconsistency if the voters are modeled as rational and forwardlooking agents and parties do not care exclusively about being elected but also about which policy to implement once elected the dynamic inconsistency arises as follows the parties have an incentive to announce convergent platforms to increase their chances of election however if the elected party is not committed to its electoral platform it has an incentive to follow its most preferred policy rather than the policy announced in its platform if voters are rational they account for this incentive thus in general in a one shot electoral game the only timeconsistent equilibrium is one in which no convergence is possible the two parties follow their most preferred policies and the voters rationally expect this outcome full convergence of parties platforms results only as a limiting case when the parties are completely indifferent with respect to the quality of the policies resulting from the election thus these results differ from the existing literature on ideologically motivated politicians for instance donald wittman 1977 1983 randall calvert 1985 which implicitly assumes the possibility of binding commitments to electoral platforms complete or partial policy convergence can be the outcome of political competition if the interaction between the parties and the voters is modeled as an infinitely repeated game in fact if the candidates have concave objective functions the welfare maximizing policy rule implies a complete convergence of parties policies however this cooperative and agreed upon policy may or may not be sustainable as a subgame perfect equilibrium depending on parameter values in particular it depends on the discount rates of the two parties the degree of polarization of their preferences and the relative popu graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university pittsburgh pa 15213 and national bureau of economic research cambridge ma 02138 this paper is based upon a chapter of my unpublished doctoral dissertation at harvard university i am greatly indebted to jeffrey sachs for directing my attention toward these issues and for many conversations i also wish to thank andrew abel dilip abreu olivier blanchard ramon caminal andrew caplin alex cukierman morris fiorina benjamin friedman herschel grossman howard rosenthal and the referees for very useful comments the responsibilitv af anv n mtnkieis af calrirp nfnlv mine the result of policy convergence in a two party system is more general than the median voter theorem for discussions of convergence results not at the median see john ledyard 1984 peter coughlin 1984 coughlin and shmuel nitzan 1981 melvin hinich 1977 for earlier work on spatial competition see richard mckelvey 1975 hinich ledyard and peter ordeshook 1972 1973 and the references quoted therein the present paper focuses on the result of convergence rather than on the median voter theorem per se

incomplete information and ideological explanations of platform divergence one of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates a solution is that candidates are ideological have policy preferences when candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences then platform divergence is theoretically predicted experimental tests of the ideological model are presented it is shown that platform divergence is significant when candidates are ideological and have incomplete information about voter preferences however candidate positions are more convergent on average than the theory predicts suggesting that subjects value winning independently of the expected payment

dormancy as a strategic response to detrimental public policy organizations in democratic societies often encounter detrimental public policies that are later reversed through rather predictable political cycles the standard organizational responses to detrimental public policies examined in the literature include exiting the market altogether attempting to change the public policy through various political strategies or passively complying with the policy however these responses might not be suitable when a detrimental policy is likely to be reversed in this paper i consider organizational dormancy which entails a temporary reduction in an organization s level of activity as a viable alternative response i propose that some organizations might be able to undergo a period of strategic inactivity in response to the onset of a detrimental public policy and maintain this inactivity until a favorable public policy returns i also propose that such dormancy is rewarded when the favorable policy returns an investigation of a panel of private commercial banks in the indian banking industry from 1981 to 2004 lends support to this proposal

campaign spending with office seeking politicians rational voters and multiple lobbies abstract i introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office seeking politicians a continuum of voters and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians the model is used to i determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter s preferred policy ii show the informational value of lobbies contributions iii evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending and iv interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information under reasonable parameter values a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 m37

the politics of persuasion when voters are rational a democratic society is considered where the voters but not the politicians are uncertain about how the economy works the parties therefore have a strategic motive to misinform the voters will the voters learn how the economy works and will the policy decisions be efficient it turns out that the degree of polarization of the political parties is crucial if the parties are very polarized voters will not trust the parties and the policy will not reflect how the economy actually works whereas the opposite is true if the parties are less polarized

special interest groups and the allocation of public funds i propose a fully rational model of government contracting that explains differences in local government spending from grants and other income in this model violations of fungibility arise from dynamic interactions between politicians and interest groups with the ability to raise funds for the local government the predictions of the model are tested by exploiting unique features of windfalls received by states under a settlement with the tobacco industry although windfalls are legally unrestricted the median state increased spending on tobacco control programs from zero to 2 30 per capita upon receipt of funds the marginal propensity to spend on such programs is 0 20 from settlement revenue and zero from overall income states which were not involved in the settlement lawsuits spend less these results cannot be explained by existing models in the literature

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

organizational environments in flux the impact of regulatory punctuations on organizational domains ceo succession and performance a central debate in organizational theory concerns how organizations evolve there are two diametrically opposing viewpoints adaptation theories predict that change occurs as fluid organizations adjust to meet shifting environmental demands while selection theories predict that change occurs through the differential selection and replacement of inert organizations as environmental demands vary over time our paper bridges these polar opposites by using a punctuated equilibrium framework to examine organizations responses to discontinuous industry level change this framework recognizes that the histories of many industries are occasionally punctuated by dramatic exogenous shocks such as radical technological innovation social and political turmoil major changes in government regulation and economic crashes our central thesis is that such environmental punctuations dramatically reduce pressures and rewards for organizational inertia and thereby alter both organizations propensities for change and their survival chances following change we focus on one form of punctuation major regulatory change and study firms in two industries general hospitals and savings and loan associations for organizations in both industries we examine three important outcomes shifts in organizational domain ceo succession and changes in financial performance our analyses show that punctuational regulatory change prompts shifts in organizational domains and executive leadership additionally post punctuation domain change and post punctuation ceo succession both affect subsequent performance we discuss our results in light of current thinking about the content and process effects of core organizational change which has been developed in the context of stable environments finally we argue for the development of more temporally sensitive theories of organizational action

interest groups and the electoral control of politicians abstract we develop a model of interest group influence in the presence of repeated electoral competition in each period of the game an interest group attempts to buy an incumbent s policy choice and a voter chooses whether to replace the incumbent with an unknown challenger the voter faces a tension between retaining good politician types and rewarding past performance the model predicts that above average incumbents face little discipline but others are disciplined increasingly and re elected at a higher rate as the interest group becomes more extreme extensions of the model consider term limits long lived groups and multiple groups

an information rationale for the power of special interests political decisions are often biased in favor of special interests at the expense of the general public and they are frequently inefficient in the sense that the losses incurred by the majority exceed the gains enjoyed by the minority this article explains the bias in terms of information asymmetries and the free rider problem first incumbents increase their reelection prospects by biasing policy toward groups that are better able to monitor their activities second because smaller groups are better able to overcome the free rider problem of costly monitoring policy will be biased in their favor third the effect of asymmetric monitoring on voter welfare is ambiguous the inefficiencies created by the policy bias are offset by a positively valued selection bias incumbents of above average quality are more likely to survive voter scrutiny than are low quality types

partisan conflicts and parliamentary dominance the norwegian political business cycle this is the author s final accepted and refereed manuscript to the article the final publication is available at www springerlink com

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

political business cycles and central bank independence this paper develops a dynamic model of rational partisan business cycles in which wage contracts overlap elections and wage setters have to make a prediction about the election result empirical analysis of 20 oecd countries supports the theoretical implication that left wing incumbents increase output but increased expectation of a left wing regime reduces it the model is extended to incorporate the effects of alternative measures of central bank independence cbi the measure of objective independence outperforms the other measures and it is found that cbi reduces politically induced business cycles

how environmentalists greened trade policy strategic action and the architecture of field overlap this article examines why and how environmental activists despite considerable political weakness and disproportionally few resources won substantive negotiating concessions that far outstripped labor achievements during nafta s negotiation despite a trade policy arena hostile to their demands environmentalists gained official recognition for the legitimacy of their claims obtained a seat at the negotiating table turned a previously technocratic concern into a highly visible populist issue and won an environmental side agreement stronger than its labor counterpart we argue that this unexpected outcome is best explained by environmentalists strategic use of mechanisms available at the intersection of multiple fields while field theory mainly focuses on interactions within a particular field we suggest that the structure of overlap between fields the architecture of field overlap creates unique points of leverage that render particular targets more vulnerable and certain strategies more effective

political parties and the business cycle in the united states 1948 1984 this paper tests the existence and the extent of a politically induced business cycle in the u s in the post world war ii period the cycle described in this paper is different from the traditional political business cycle of nordhaus it is based on a systematic difference between the monetary policies of the two parties in a model with labor contracts from an explicit optimization problem we derive a system of equations for output and money growth then we successfully test the non linear restriction imposed by the theory on the parameters of the system of equations we cannot reject the hypothesis that money growth has been systematically different under the two types of administration and that this difference contributes to explain output fluctuations

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

interest groups campaign contributions and probabilistic voting this essay develops a simple model to analyze the impact of campaign contributions on electoral policy decisions of candidates for office interest groups here are firms that select contributions under the assumption that candidates policies and opposing groups donations remain unaltered candidates however recognize that their policy choices affect contributions campaign contributions are used by candidates to affect policy oriented voters perceptions of candidates positions in this framework the introduction of campaign contributions may affect candidates electoral policies and if they do then they benefit surely exactly one of the two interest groups

is there a dead spot new evidence on fomc decisions before elections using new data that chronicle the fed s internal forecast of the output gap from 1973 to 1998 this paper tests for an electoral cycle in the decisions of the federal open market committee fomc the paper provides evidence of a dead spot in the committee s decisions before presidential elections for given values of these internal forecasts the fomc is less likely to decide to tighten monetary policy in the year preceding a presidential election than at other times

signaling character in electoral competition we study a one dimensional hotelling downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation a fraction of candidates have character and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform this is unobservable to voters character is desirable and a voter s utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate s character this structure induces a signaling game between strategic candidates and voters since a policy platform affects voters utilities not only directly but also indirectly through inferences about a candidate s character the model generates a number of predictions starting with a failure of the median voter theorem jel d72 d82

how pressure groups activate voters and move candidates closer to the median this article shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising the article models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising and making endorsements the pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position chosen by the candidate nevertheless when uninformed voters use a strategic rule of thumb pressure group contributions always move the outcome of the election closer to the median voter by using such a rule of thumb when there is advertising uninformed voters can have the same influence on the election as informed voters how should uninformed but rational voters respond to political advertising can pressure groups with financial resources to fund political campaigns that provide information on the candidates gain at the expense of the median voter this article seeks to answer these and related questions building on the framework introduced by baron 1994 and used extensively by others i model the case where there are two types of voters informed and uninformed i investigate two opposing assumptions regarding candidate preferences

value elicitation in retail and laboratory environments abstract an increasing number of studies have begun conducting economic experiments in field rather than laboratory settings we directly compare results from laboratory and field valuation experiments after controlling for unengaged bidders results indicate field valuations were greater than laboratory valuations results are discussed in the context of recent literature on commitment costs

political competition with campaign contributions and informative advertising this paper presents a theory of political competition with campaign contributions and informative political advertising policy motivated parties compete by selecting candidates and interest groups provide contributions to enhance the electoral prospects of like minded candidates contributions are used to finance advertising campaigns that provide voters with information about candidates ideologies voters update their beliefs rationally given the information they have received the paper uses the theory to analyze the welfare economics of contribution limits such limits are shown to redistribute welfare from ordinary citizens to members of interest groups jel d72 h40

loss aversion in politics we study how loss aversion affects the political equilibrium in a simple majority voting model first we show a status quo bias which leads to path dependence second loss aversion implies a moderating effect on the most extreme voters third in a dynamic setting the effect of loss aversion diminishes with the length of the planning horizon of voters however in the presence of a projection bias majorities are partially unable to understand how fast they will adapt to a new policy this makes changes less likely and induces time inconsistency policy changes are timid at the beginning while in later periods they are made progressively more radical fourth in a stochastic environment loss aversion yields a significant distaste for risk but also a smaller attachment to the status quo the application of these results to a model of redistribution leads to empirically plausible implications

campaign finances and political platforms the economics of political controversy one implication of the widely used median voter model is that candidates have little to gain by disagreement apart from some epsilon of controversy necessary to demonstrate which candidate is closer to the median voter position in the policy dimension in question votes are maximized by taking essentially identical position this is true at the nash median voter equilibrium and is true away from equilibrium as a consequence two candidate competition within one dimensional policy domain is expected to generate considerable agreement about appropriate policy we do in fact observe that in many elections candidate positions converge to very similar positions on matters of broad concern it is largely this convergence that gives the median voter model its considerable credence in spite of the fragility of the underlying theory on the other hand the convergence is rarely as complete as might have been expected and there are elections where candidates take substantively different positions this paper explores the extent to which the campaign contributions of politically active groups may draw candidates away from the median voter position as candidate seek funds to run effective election campaigns candidates gener

campaign advertising and voter welfare this paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it an electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players many voters two candidates and one interest group the group has non verifiable insider information on the candidates quality and on the basis of this information offers a contribution to each candidate in exchange for a favorable policy position candidates spend the contributions they receive on non directly informative advertising this paper shows that 1 a separating equilibrium exists in which the group contributes to a candidate only if the insider information about that candidate is positive 2 although voters are fully rational a ban on campaign advertising can be welfare improving and 3 split contributions may arise in equilibrium and if they arise too often they are detrimental to voters

candidates credibility and re election incentives i study elections between citizen candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re election in each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences the elected candidate chooses the policy to implement and how much rent seeking to engage in when in office as the voter decides both which candidate to elect and subsequently whether the candidate is retained this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability i show that in the best stationary equilibrium when utility functions are concave over policy non median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter in this equilibrium there are two candidates who are elected at some history and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge this divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent seeking increasing voter welfare copyright 2013 oxford university press

effects of label information on consumer willingness to pay for food attributes choice experiments ces are often used to elicit consumer willingness to pay wtp for food attributes a concern about these approaches is that food attributes provided to respondents are assumed independent of attributes not provided we use surveys containing a series of ces to investigate effects of adding beef steak attributes wtp for important attributes in the ces decrease when the number of attributes increases from three to four while wtp increases when the number of attributes increases from four to five changes in wtp for attributes depend on their relationships with newly added attributes and the number of attributes presented copyright 2007 oxford university press

asymmetric information and the electoral momentum of public opinion polls this paper demonstrates that the existence of public opinion polls amplifies the effects of shifts in the distribution of the public s preferences over the issue space on the election s results voters evaluate candidates by their positions on the issue space and by a valence or general ability dimension some individual s the informed have more precise information about the relative abilities of candidates than others the uninformed since public opinion polls reflect the information of the informed high approval for a candidate at the polls signals to the uninformed that he is more likely to be abler however high approval may also reflect changes in the distribution of the public on the issue space as a result the uninformed partly confuse the two effects and public opinion polls tend to reinforce the effects of shifts in the public s ideological preferences on election results a shift to the right that shows up as more support for the right wing candidate at the polls is partly interpreted as a higher efficiency of this candidate as a result he wins with a higher margin than the margin he would have won with in the absence of polls or under perfect information

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

should we stop meating like this reducing meat consumption through substitution high levels of meat consumption are increasingly being criticised for ethical environmental and social reasons plant based meat substitutes have been identified as healthy sources of protein that in comparison to meat offer a number of social environmental and health benefits and may play a role in reducing meat consumption however there has been a lack of research on the role they can play in the policy agenda and how specific meat substitute attributes can influence consumers to replace partially replace meat in their diets in this paper we examine consumers preferences for attributes of meat and meat substitute products and develop consumer segments based on these preferences the results of a choice experiment with 247 uk consumers using food labels and mince ground meat illustrate that the type of mince fat content country of origin and price are major factors that influence choice carbon footprint method of production and brand play a secondary role in determining consumers choices of meat meat substitutes latent class analysis is used to identify six consumer segments price conscious healthy eaters taste driven green organic and vegetarian consumers which have different socio demographic characteristics and meat consumption patterns future interventions and policies aimed at reducing meat consumption including labelling provision of more information financial incentives educational campaigns and new product development will be more effective if they are holistic and target specific consumer segments instead of focus on the average consumer