Rationalizing systematic discrepancies between election outcomes and opinion polls

Data Troubles: Explaining Discrepancies between Official Votes and Exit Polls in the 2004 Presidential Election

Disentangling Bias and Variance in Election Polls

It is well known among researchers and practitioners that election polls su↵er from a variety of sampling and non-sampling errors, often collectively referred to as total survey error. Reported margins of error typically only capture sampling variability, and in particular, generally ignore non-sampling errors in defining the target population (e.g., errors due to uncertainty in who will vote)....

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...

Forecasting the Vote: An Analytical Comparison of Election Markets and Public Opinion Polls

The dominant scienti c methodology for short term forecasting in important elections uses trial-heat polls, in which a sample of respondents report their current electoral preferences. Election markets, where self-selected participants trade shares of candidates at prices predictive of election day results, provide an alternative forecasting method. Because this new forecasting methodology ofte...

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...