Manipulated Electorates and Information Aggregation∗

We study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost. Voters are symmetric ex-ante and prefer policy a in state A and policy b in state B, but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state. Each recruited voter observes a private signal that is imperfectly informative about the unknown state, but does not learn the size of the electorate. In contrast to existing results for large elections, there are equilibria in which information aggregation fails: As the voter recruitment cost disappears, a perfectly informed organizer can ensure that policy a is implemented independent of the state by appropriately choosing the number of recruited voters in each state. ∗We are grateful for helpful comments from Dirk Bergemann, Laurent Bouton, Hulya Eraslan, Christian Hellwig, Nenad Kos, Thomas Mariotti, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Larry Samuelson, Ronny Razin, Andrew Newman as well as comments from seminar audiences at Yale, USC, UCLA, ASU, Princeton, Bonn, Oslo, Cerge-ei, HEC Paris, Toulouse, Georgetown, Maastricht, UCL, LSE, Boston University and Rochester, and audiences at the workshop on Games, Contracts and Organizations in Santiago, Chile, Stony Brook Game Theory Festival, CETC 2014, Warwick Economic Theory Conference and NBER conference on GE at Wisconsin-Madison. Krisztina Horvath and Lin Zhang provided valuable proof reading. Lauermann thanks Cowles Foundation at Yale University and Ekmekci thanks Toulouse School of Economics for their hospitality.