Inflation, Unemployment, and Public Opinion Polls

The welfare effects of public opinion polls

This paper presents an experimental study of the effects of polls on voters’ welfare. The analysis shows that polls have a different effect on closely divided and lopsided divided electorates. The data show that in closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information on the voters’ distribution of preferences significantly raises the participation of subject...

Deliberative Polls: toward Improved Measures of "informed" Public Opinion?

New research techniques have recently been developed to gather measures of public opinion that is better informed or more deliberative than that recorded in typical mass opinion surveys. These techniques include deliberative polls, educational surveys, and citizen planning cells. In view of what they set out to accomplish, what can we say from a scientific perspective about the utility of these...

Incentive-compatible Online Opinion Polls

The basic idea behind such information markets is that the pricing scheme of the market encourages the participants to buy or sell shares in accordance to their private information. Consider, for example, the security that pays $1 if the winner of the 2008 US presidential elections is democrat. An agent who privately believes with probability p that US will have a democrat president in 2008, wi...

Toward an Understanding of the Cyclical Formation of Public Opinion: Presidential Approval Ratings and Public Opinion Polls

Forecasting the Vote: A Theoretical Comparison of Election Markets and Public Opinion Polls

The dominant methodology for short-term forecasting of electoral outcomes uses trial-heat polls, where respondents report their current electoral preferences (not their election-day predictions). Election markets, where self-selected participants trade shares of candidates at prices predictive of election-day results, provide an alternative method that often produces more accurate forecasts. Co...