How to Win a Large Election

Forthcoming, Games and Economic Behavior

41 Pages Posted: 11 Jun 2009 Last revised: 29 Nov 2012

See all articles by Michael Mandler

Michael Mandler

University of London, Royal Holloway College - Department of Economics

Date Written: October 2012

Abstract

We consider the optimization problem of a campaign trying to win an election when facing aggregate uncertainty, where agents' voting probabilities are uncertain. Even a small amount of uncertainty will in a large electorate eliminate many of counterintuitive results that arise when voting probabilities are known. In particular, a campaign that can affect the voting probabilities of a fraction of the electorate should maximize the expected difference between its candidate's and the opposing candidate's share of the fraction's potential vote. When a campaign can target only finitely many voters, maximization of the same objective function remains optimal if a convergence condition is satisfied. When voting probabilities are certain, this convergence condition obtains only at knife-edge combinations of parameters, but when voting probabilities are uncertain the condition is necessarily satisfied.

Keywords: elections, expected margin of victory, law of large numbers, local limit theorem

JEL Classification: D72, D81

Suggested Citation

Mandler, Michael, How to Win a Large Election (October 2012). Forthcoming, Games and Economic Behavior, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1417690 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1417690

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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