I analyze the effect of a sequential election system when the first voter has private information using a simple two candidate, two voter model in which the second voter is decisive. Both voters observe the candidates’ policy positions, but only the first voter observes which candidate is competent. I show that in equilibrium the candidates pander to the policy preferences of the first voter. D...

Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique ...

The present paper studies the Hotelling-Downs and the Wittman-Roemer models of two-party competition when voter conformism is present and the policy space is uni-dimensional. We consider two types of voter conformism, bandwagon and underdog, and study their effects on political equilibrium of the two models. Even if voter conformism is present, the Hotelling-Downs parties propose an identical p...

We describe a practical e-voting protocol which guarantees e-voting protocol requirements: eligibility, privacy, accuracy, fairness, receipt-freeness, uncoercibility, robustness and verifiability. Unlike existing blind signature based protocols, in which the authority blindly signs ballot or part of ballot, the authority in our protocol blindly signs voter’s pseudo identity. Hereafter, voter be...

In this paper, I develop a positive model in which altruistic agents vote over quadratic (progressive) income tax schedules. The agents have heterogeneous preferences and productivities, and the model incorporates the incentive e¤ects of taxation. The main result of the paper is that under standard assumptions, there exists a self-con...rming majority rule equilibrium in which the agents’ labor...

In a general bargaining model with a fixed proposer, we show that the agenda setter’s equilibrium payoff is never lower than her payoff in the static model. There is a cutoff level of voter patience such that below the cutoff, the static equilibrium (possibly along with others) obtains; and above the cutoff, all equilibria are in mixed proposal strategies, and the agenda setter does strictly be...

It is shown that the counting function of n Boolean variables can be implemented with the formulae of size O(n3.06) over the basis of all 2-input Boolean functions and of size O(n4.54) over the standard basis. The same bounds follow for the complexity of any threshold symmetric function of n variables and particularly for the majority function. Any bit of the product of binary numbers of length...

values alone capture too little information about relationships between concrete values. For example, consider a system containing a majority voter. The voter's outputs depend on equality relationships among its inputs. If two inputs both have abstract value N, denoting the natural numbers, there is no way to tell from this whether they are equal. To more accurately track relationships between ...