Twitter is a popular real-time microblogging service that allows its users to share short pieces of information known as “tweets” (limited to 140 characters). Users write tweets to express their opinions about various topics pertaining to their daily lives. With a total 175 million users and 95 million tweets published per day (as of September 2010), Twitter serves as an ideal platform for the ...

Competitive elections are frequently decided by which side can generate larger turnout on polling day. When decided on whether to turnout voters are assumed to balance the cost of going to the polls with the prospect of making a difference in the election outcome. We present a stochastic model of turnout where voters receive information about current turnout propensities of the voting populus t...

On February 29, 2004, the college football Bowl Championship Series (BCS) announced a proposal to add a fifth game to the “BCS bowls” to improve access for mid-major teams ordinarily denied invitations to these lucrative postseason games. Although still subject to final approval, this agreement is expected to be instituted with the new BCS contract just prior to the 2006 season. There aren’t to...

We present a stochastic model of coordination in turnout games. In each period a randomly selected voter receives information about current play through noisy polls and then, based on this information, forms expectations about the current conÞguration of play and chooses a best response. We prove the existence of a unique limiting distribution for the process and show that even in large elector...

THE PARADOX At one point during the 1988 campaign, Michael Dukakis was ahead in the public opinion polls by 17 percentage points, but he eventually lost the election by 8 percent. Walter Mondale was ahead in the polls by 4 percent during the 1984 campaign but lost the election in a landslide. During June and July of 1992, Clinton, Bush, and Perot each had turns in the public opinion poll lead. ...

Its fair to say that when it comes to global entities that matter to us, we are quite obsessed with finding out what other people think about them. In the past, querying people’s opinions with respect to a global entity such as Michael Jackson, Microsoft or Cuba was done through user polls funded by organizations and only a small percentage of these questionable polls trickled to the average pe...

The paradox between an individual’s decisions to head to the polls and the absence of strictly rational arguments for this action has intrigued – and troubled – many scholars.The present article surveys various theoretical contributions to resolve this paradox of (not) voting. We assess these approaches based on their ability to explain a number of ‘stylised facts’ with respect to voter turnout...

We present a stochastic model of coordination in turnout games with boundedly rational voters. In each period a randomly selected voter receives information about current play through noisy polls and then, based on this information, forms expectations about the current configuration of play and chooses a best response. We prove the existence of a unique limiting distribution for the process and...

AbstractThis study examines whether infrastructure and processes at polling places vary by the race income of community where polls are located voting process...

E-journal, printed journal, and database usage data from campus polls conducted annually, 1998–2000, at one large research university show increased use of e-journals and decreased use of printed journals by faculty and graduate students as the number of available e-journals increased from two hundred to more than three thousand. Little or no statistical correlation between age and frequency of...