The talk will be delivered by Prof. Vasudha Jain, IIT Kanpur
6 July, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on ‘Binary Elections, Private Polls and Duverger's Law’, to be led by Prof. Vasudha Jain, IIT Kanpur (Economics area), at 4 pm on 20th July 2023, at Classroom K21.
Abstract: Despite its popularity, costly acquisition of private information by political parties through polls remains unaddressed in the literature. The research studies elections over two policies where office-seeking parties face uncertainty about voter preferences but have the option to conduct costly private polls. A non-monotonic relationship is found between stability of a two-party system and informative precision of polls. This is driven by the facts that: i) the payoff from entry by a ‘third’ party may increase or decrease or stay constant with precision, depending on equilibrium expectations about who acquires information, and ii) informed parties can do worse than uninformed parties. Voter welfare improves with information but never simultaneously in both public and private sources, and when private, rising welfare is accompanied by falling policy polarization and reduced choice for the voters.
Speaker Profile: Dr. Vasudha Jain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her research interests are in game theory and the economics of information. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Webpage Link: https://sites.google.com/site/vasudhajainecon/
The talk will be delivered by Prof. Vasudha Jain, IIT Kanpur
6 July, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on ‘Binary Elections, Private Polls and Duverger's Law’, to be led by Prof. Vasudha Jain, IIT Kanpur (Economics area), at 4 pm on 20th July 2023, at Classroom K21.
Abstract: Despite its popularity, costly acquisition of private information by political parties through polls remains unaddressed in the literature. The research studies elections over two policies where office-seeking parties face uncertainty about voter preferences but have the option to conduct costly private polls. A non-monotonic relationship is found between stability of a two-party system and informative precision of polls. This is driven by the facts that: i) the payoff from entry by a ‘third’ party may increase or decrease or stay constant with precision, depending on equilibrium expectations about who acquires information, and ii) informed parties can do worse than uninformed parties. Voter welfare improves with information but never simultaneously in both public and private sources, and when private, rising welfare is accompanied by falling policy polarization and reduced choice for the voters.
Speaker Profile: Dr. Vasudha Jain is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her research interests are in game theory and the economics of information. She received her PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Webpage Link: https://sites.google.com/site/vasudhajainecon/