Matteo Triossi (University of Chile)
3 October 2016 @ 12:45
- Past event
“Costly Information acquisition: the role of abstention”
Abstract
Citizens have little and uneven levels of political knowledge, consistently with the rational ignorance hypothesis. The paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with voluntary voting and endogenous information acquisition accounting for these facts. While, under compulsory voting, majoritarian elections generically fail to completely aggregate information, under voluntary voting participation adjust endogenously so that election aggregate perfectly information. Differently then from the case where information is exogenous, compulsory and voluntary voting are not asymptotically equivalent: voluntary voting is asymptotically superior to compulsory voting.