The swing voter's curse with adversarial preferences

Abstract We analyze voting behavior in a large electorate in which voters have adversarial state-contingent preferences with incomplete information about the state of the world. We show that one type of voter can suffer from the swing voter's curse a la Feddersen and Pesendorfer [The swing voter's curse, Amer. Econ. Rev. 86 (1996) 408–424], and go on to characterize the symmetric Nash equilibria of this model under different parameter values. We prove that unlike settings with nonadversarial preferences, there are equilibria in which in one state of the world, a minority-preferred candidate almost surely wins the election and thus the election may fail to correctly aggregate information. Indeed, we show that the fraction of the electorate dissatisfied with the result can be as large as 66 2 3 % .

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