Thomas R Palfrey
Biographic Data
| ID | 692196 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas R Palfrey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas R |
| FAMILY NAME | Palfrey |
| SIGNATURE | PALFREY T R |
| AFFILIATIONS | California Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0769-8109 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 874 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1940 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Bilateral Conflict: An Experimental Study of Strategic Effectiveness and Equilibrium
Bilateral conflict involves an attacker with several alternative attack methods and a defender who can take various actions to better respond to different types of attack. These situations have wide applicability to political, legal, and economic disputes, but they are particularly challenging to study empirically because the payoffs are unknown. Moreover, each party has an incentive to behave unpredictably, so theoretical predictions are stochas…
Organizing for Collective Action: Olson Revisited
Communication Among Voters Benefits the Majority Party
How does communication among voters affect turnout? In a laboratory experiment, subjects, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining. Pre-play communication treatments, relative to the no communication control, are public communication (subjects exchange public messages through computers) and party communication (messages are public within one's own party). Communication benefits the majority party by increasi…
Candidate Entry and Political Polarization: An Experimental Study
We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on a citizen-candidate model with private information about ideal points. Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments; that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates more often than moderate citizens. Second, less entry occurs, with even greater polarization, when voters have directional information about candidates' ideal points, using ideological party …
External validation of voter turnout models by concealed parameter recovery
Reporting Guidelines for Experimental Research: A Report from the Experimental Research Section Standards Committee
The Standards Committee of the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association has produced reporting guidelines that aim to increase the clarity of experimental research reports. This paper describes the Committee's rationale for the guidelines it developed and includes our Recommended Reporting Standards for Experiments (Laboratory, Field, Survey). It begins with a content analysis of current reporting practices in p…
Turnout and Power Sharing
Differences in electoral rules and/or legislative, executive or legal institutions across countries induce different mappings from election outcomes to distributions of power. We explore how these different mappings affect voters' participation in a democracy. Assuming heterogeneity in the cost of voting, the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences for the parties: when the two partie…
Candidate Entry and Political Polarization: An Antimedian Voter Theorem
We study a citizen‐candidate‐entry model with private information about ideal points. We fully characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of the entry game and show that only relatively “extreme” citizen types enter the electoral competition as candidates, whereas more “moderate” types never enter. It generally leads to substantial political polarization, even when the electorate is not polarized and citizens understand that they vote for more…
Competitive Equilibrium in Markets for Votes
We develop a competitive equilibrium theory of a market for votes. Before voting on a binary issue, individuals may buy and sell their votes with each other. We define the concept of ex ante vote-trading equilibrium and show by construction that an equilibrium exists. The equilibrium we characterize always results in dictatorship if there is any trade, and the market for votes generates welfare losses, relative to simple majority voting, if the c…
Legislative Bargaining and the Dynamics of Public Investment
We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizon. In each period, there is a societal endowment that can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the time path of investment and consumption. In a legislature representatives of each ofndistricts bargain over the current period's endowment for investment in the public good and…
Laboratory Experiments
This article discusses four kinds of political science experiments that use the political theory/formal theory approach. These are committee decision-making, elections and candidate competition, information aggregation, and voter turnout and participation games. Each kind of experiment is examined in detail.
Laboratory Experiments in Political Economy
This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees and elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, and the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find si…
Chapter 60 Quantal Response Equilibria: A Brief Synopsis
The Paradox of Voter Participation? A Laboratory Study
It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey-Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size effect, whereby turnout goes down in larger electorat…
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
An experimental study of storable votes
The Effect of Candidate Quality on Electoral Equilibrium: An Experimental Study
When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium va…
Mixed Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate
Federal Mandates by Popular Demand
This paper proposes a new framework for studying federal mandates regarding public policies in areas such as environmental quality, public health, highway safety, and the provision of local public goods. Voters have single-peaked preferences along a single policy dimension. There are two levels of government, federal and local. The federal level can constrain local policy by mandating a minimum (or maximum) policy. Localities are free to adopt an…
Equilibria in Campaign Spending Games: Theory and Data
We present a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both candidates, which implies that the simultaneity problem should not be present in close races and should be pr…
An Experimental Study of Jury Decision Rules
We present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury. We consider three treatment variables: group size (three or six), number of votes needed for conviction (majority or unanimity), and pre-vote deliberation. We find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule: A large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a sta…
Political Confederation
This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: degree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dimension varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) and population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters have incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degr…
Quantal Response Equilibria for Extensive Form Games
This article investigates the use of standard econometric models for quantal choice to study equilibria of extensive form games. Players make choices based on a quantal-choice model and assume other players do so as well. We define an agent quantal response equilibrium (AQRE), which applies QRE to the agent normal form of an extensive form game and imposes a statistical version of sequential rationality. We also define a parametric specification,…
Campaign Spending and Incumbency: An Alternative Simultaneous Equations Approach
This paper estimates the effects of incumbent spending and challenger spending in U.S. House elections in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper employs FIML simultaneous equations analysis involving instrumental variables as vote predictors, and zero-covariance restrictions for the vote-spending disturbances. This procedure allows the estimation of spending effects given plausible assumptions about the effects of unobserved causes of the vote on candida…
Quantal Response Equilibria for Normal Form Games
Voter Participation and Strategic Uncertainty
The paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters. In game-theoretic models of voter participation under complete information, equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high. In contrast, when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present, only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the elec…
The Relationship between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior
The question of voter sophistication is important for understanding voter and candidate behavior in mass elections. We develop an index of voter information - based on perceptual data - and find that it is significantly related to ideological extremism and voting behavior. Individuals with a high level of information tend to be more extreme than those with low levels and are much more likely to vote
A strategic calculus of voting
Equilibria in Campaign Spending Games: Theory and Data
We present a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both candidates, which implies that the simultaneity problem should not be present in close races and should be pr…
The Paradox of Voter Participation? A Laboratory Study
It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey-Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size effect, whereby turnout goes down in larger electorat…
Campaign Spending and Incumbency: An Alternative Simultaneous Equations Approach
This paper estimates the effects of incumbent spending and challenger spending in U.S. House elections in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper employs FIML simultaneous equations analysis involving instrumental variables as vote predictors, and zero-covariance restrictions for the vote-spending disturbances. This procedure allows the estimation of spending effects given plausible assumptions about the effects of unobserved causes of the vote on candida…
An Experimental Study of Jury Decision Rules
We present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury. We consider three treatment variables: group size (three or six), number of votes needed for conviction (majority or unanimity), and pre-vote deliberation. We find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule: A large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a sta…
Turnout and Power Sharing
Differences in electoral rules and/or legislative, executive or legal institutions across countries induce different mappings from election outcomes to distributions of power. We explore how these different mappings affect voters' participation in a democracy. Assuming heterogeneity in the cost of voting, the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences for the parties: when the two partie…
The Effect of Candidate Quality on Electoral Equilibrium: An Experimental Study
When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium va…
The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect
Laboratory Experiments in Political Economy
This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees and elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, and the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find si…
Agendas, Strategic Voting, and Signaling with Incomplete Information
The literature on agendas with sincere and strategic voting represents an important contribution to our understanding of committees, of institutions, and of the opportunities to manipulate outcomes by the manipulation of institutions. That literature, though, imposes an assumption that may be unrealistic in many situations; namely, that everyone knows the preferences of everyone else. In this essay we apply Bayesian equilibrium analysis to show t…
Political Confederation
This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: degree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dimension varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) and population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters have incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degr…
Federal Mandates by Popular Demand
This paper proposes a new framework for studying federal mandates regarding public policies in areas such as environmental quality, public health, highway safety, and the provision of local public goods. Voters have single-peaked preferences along a single policy dimension. There are two levels of government, federal and local. The federal level can constrain local policy by mandating a minimum (or maximum) policy. Localities are free to adopt an…
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
Reporting Guidelines for Experimental Research: A Report from the Experimental Research Section Standards Committee
The Standards Committee of the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association has produced reporting guidelines that aim to increase the clarity of experimental research reports. This paper describes the Committee's rationale for the guidelines it developed and includes our Recommended Reporting Standards for Experiments (Laboratory, Field, Survey). It begins with a content analysis of current reporting practices in p…
Candidate Entry and Political Polarization: An Antimedian Voter Theorem
We study a citizen‐candidate‐entry model with private information about ideal points. We fully characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of the entry game and show that only relatively “extreme” citizen types enter the electoral competition as candidates, whereas more “moderate” types never enter. It generally leads to substantial political polarization, even when the electorate is not polarized and citizens understand that they vote for more…
Legislative Bargaining and the Dynamics of Public Investment
We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizon. In each period, there is a societal endowment that can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the time path of investment and consumption. In a legislature representatives of each ofndistricts bargain over the current period's endowment for investment in the public good and…
Communication Among Voters Benefits the Majority Party
How does communication among voters affect turnout? In a laboratory experiment, subjects, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining. Pre-play communication treatments, relative to the no communication control, are public communication (subjects exchange public messages through computers) and party communication (messages are public within one's own party). Communication benefits the majority party by increasi…
Candidate Entry and Political Polarization: An Experimental Study
We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on a citizen-candidate model with private information about ideal points. Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments; that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates more often than moderate citizens. Second, less entry occurs, with even greater polarization, when voters have directional information about candidates' ideal points, using ideological party …
Mechanism Design with Incomplete Information: A Solution to the Implementation Problem
The main result of this paper is that the multiple equilibrium problem in mechanism design can be avoided in private-value models if agents do not use weakly dominated strategies in equilibrium. We show that in such settings, any incentive-compatible allocation rule can be made the unique equilibrium outcome to a mechanism. We derive a general necessary condition for unique implementation that implies that the positive result for private-value mo…
Competitive Equilibrium in Markets for Votes
We develop a competitive equilibrium theory of a market for votes. Before voting on a binary issue, individuals may buy and sell their votes with each other. We define the concept of ex ante vote-trading equilibrium and show by construction that an equilibrium exists. The equilibrium we characterize always results in dictatorship if there is any trade, and the market for votes generates welfare losses, relative to simple majority voting, if the c…
External validation of voter turnout models by concealed parameter recovery
Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry
Armed Forces' Foreign Language Teaching: Critical Evaluation and Implications
A strategic calculus of voting
Spatial Equilibrium with Entry
This paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote-maximizing third party. The resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the Hotelling “median” equilibrium. Established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election. This provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of …
Participation and the provision of discrete public goods: A strategic analysis
Voter Participation and Strategic Uncertainty
The paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters. In game-theoretic models of voter participation under complete information, equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high. In contrast, when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present, only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the elec…
The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect
The Relationship between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior
The question of voter sophistication is important for understanding voter and candidate behavior in mass elections. We develop an index of voter information - based on perceptual data - and find that it is significantly related to ideological extremism and voting behavior. Individuals with a high level of information tend to be more extreme than those with low levels and are much more likely to vote
Agendas, Strategic Voting, and Signaling with Incomplete Information
The literature on agendas with sincere and strategic voting represents an important contribution to our understanding of committees, of institutions, and of the opportunities to manipulate outcomes by the manipulation of institutions. That literature, though, imposes an assumption that may be unrealistic in many situations; namely, that everyone knows the preferences of everyone else. In this essay we apply Bayesian equilibrium analysis to show t…
Mechanism Design with Incomplete Information: A Solution to the Implementation Problem
The main result of this paper is that the multiple equilibrium problem in mechanism design can be avoided in private-value models if agents do not use weakly dominated strategies in equilibrium. We show that in such settings, any incentive-compatible allocation rule can be made the unique equilibrium outcome to a mechanism. We derive a general necessary condition for unique implementation that implies that the positive result for private-value mo…
An Experimental Study of the Centipede Game
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Experimental Foundations of Political Science
Quantal Response Equilibria for Normal Form Games
Quantal Response Equilibria for Extensive Form Games
This article investigates the use of standard econometric models for quantal choice to study equilibria of extensive form games. Players make choices based on a quantal-choice model and assume other players do so as well. We define an agent quantal response equilibrium (AQRE), which applies QRE to the agent normal form of an extensive form game and imposes a statistical version of sequential rationality. We also define a parametric specification,…
Campaign Spending and Incumbency: An Alternative Simultaneous Equations Approach
This paper estimates the effects of incumbent spending and challenger spending in U.S. House elections in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper employs FIML simultaneous equations analysis involving instrumental variables as vote predictors, and zero-covariance restrictions for the vote-spending disturbances. This procedure allows the estimation of spending effects given plausible assumptions about the effects of unobserved causes of the vote on candida…
Political Confederation
This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: degree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dimension varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) and population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters have incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degr…
Federal Mandates by Popular Demand
This paper proposes a new framework for studying federal mandates regarding public policies in areas such as environmental quality, public health, highway safety, and the provision of local public goods. Voters have single-peaked preferences along a single policy dimension. There are two levels of government, federal and local. The federal level can constrain local policy by mandating a minimum (or maximum) policy. Localities are free to adopt an…
Equilibria in Campaign Spending Games: Theory and Data
We present a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both candidates, which implies that the simultaneity problem should not be present in close races and should be pr…
An Experimental Study of Jury Decision Rules
We present experimental results on groups facing a decision problem analogous to that faced by a jury. We consider three treatment variables: group size (three or six), number of votes needed for conviction (majority or unanimity), and pre-vote deliberation. We find evidence of strategic voting under the unanimity rule: A large fraction of our subjects vote for a decision analogous to conviction even when their private information indicates a sta…
Mixed Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate
The Effect of Candidate Quality on Electoral Equilibrium: An Experimental Study
When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium va…
An experimental study of storable votes
The Paradox of Voter Participation? A Laboratory Study
It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey-Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size effect, whereby turnout goes down in larger electorat…
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
Chapter 60 Quantal Response Equilibria: A Brief Synopsis
Economics (29 works) · Political science (25 works) · Computer Science (21 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Game Theory and Voting Systems (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (17 works) · Microeconomics (17 works) · Voting (17 works)