CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Hajnal, Áron Gyula |
|---|---|
| Title | Why do politicians lie? - A model of political communication with credulous voters |
| Summary | I build a model of political campaigning with probabilistic voting when some of the voters are credulous. Parties have fixed and pliable policies and can adjust their pliable policies to maximize their vote share. Voters have an optimal pliable policy which is unknown to them and a random preference for fixed policies. Before the election a special interest group, which knows the optimal level of the pliable policy but would itself prefer a different value, can wage a campaign which can convey some information to voters about the optimal policy. When all voters are rational, the interest group truthfully reveals an interval in which the true optimal policy lies if its bias is not too large. When a sufficiently large fraction of the electorate is credulous the interest group's campaign overstates its policy bias and can always ensure that its own optimal policy is implemented. If the bias is small enough to enable an informative equilibrium when all voters are rational, the introduction of credulous voters is Pareto improving. |
| Supervisor | Rots, Eyno |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/hajnal_aron.pdf |
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