Mehmet Ekmekci Delivered a Rerport on 'Manipulated Electorates and Information Aggregation'

On May 19 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE. Mehmet Ekmekci (Boston college) spoke on 'Manipulated Electorates and Information  Aggregation'. The report is co-authored by Stephan Lauermann (University of Bonn).

Abstract: 

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.