The Fragility of Information Aggregation in Large Elections

Games and Economic Behavior (Forthcoming)

33 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2008 Last revised: 26 Apr 2013

See all articles by Michael Mandler

Michael Mandler

University of London, Royal Holloway College - Department of Economics

Date Written: June 2011

Abstract

In a common-values election where voters receive a signal about which candidate is superior, suppose there is a small amount of uncertainty about the likelihood of the signal's outcome, holding fixed the correct candidate. Once this uncertainty is resolved, the signal is i.i.d. across agents. Information can then fail to aggregate. The candidate less likely to be correct given agents' signals can be elected with probability near 1 in a large electorate even if the distribution of signal likelihoods is arbitrarily near to a classical model where agents are certain that a particular likelihood obtains given that a specific candidate is correct.

Keywords: information aggregation, elections, common values, exchangeability

JEL Classification: C72, D72

Suggested Citation

Mandler, Michael, The Fragility of Information Aggregation in Large Elections (June 2011). Games and Economic Behavior (Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1291985 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1291985

Michael Mandler (Contact Author)

University of London, Royal Holloway College - Department of Economics ( email )

Royal Holloway College
University of London
Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX
United Kingdom
+44 1784 443985 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/035/

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