Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 What Makes Voters Turn Out: the Effects of Polls and Beliefs

Nber Working Paper Series Experimenting with Measurement Error: Techniques with Applications to the Caltech Cohort Study

Measurement error is ubiquitous in experimental work. It leads to imperfect statistical controls, attenuated estimated effects of elicited behaviors, and biased correlations between characteristics. We develop simple statistical techniques for dealing with experimental measurement error. These techniques are applied to data from the Caltech Cohort Study, which conducts repeated incentivized sur...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Aggregation and Dynamics of Survey Responses: the Case of Presidential Approval

In this paper we critique much of the empirical literature on the important political science concept of presidential approval. Much of the recent research on presidential approval has focused on the dynamic nature of approval; arguments have raged about whether presidential approval is integrated, co-integrated, or fractionally integrated. We argue that none of these time-series concepts, impo...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Equilibrium Equivalence with J Candidates and N Voters

In this paper, we examine the incentives facing candidates in the spatial voting model. We assume that voters' types are independent, but allow for nonidentical distributions across voters. Examining candidate positional equilibria as a function of voter behavior, we nd that what we term p-symmetric strict p-local equilibria when candidates maximize expected plurality are also strict p-local eq...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 on Incentives and Updating in Agent Based Models

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Range Convexity and Ambiguity Averse Preferences

We show that range convexity of beliefs, a ‘technical’ condition that appears naturally in axiomatizations of preferences in a Savage-like framework, imposes some unexpected restrictions when modelling ambiguity averse preferences. That is, when it is added to a mild condition, range convexity makes the preferences collapse to subjective expected utility as soon as they satisfy structural condi...