The strategic sincerity of Approval voting

We show that Approval voting need not trigger sincere behavior in equilibrium of Poisson voting games and hence might lead a strategic voter to skip a candidate preferred to his worst preferred approved candidate. We identify two main rationales for these violations of sincerity. First, if a candidate has no votes, a voter might skip him. Notwithstanding, we provide sufficient conditions on the voters’ preference intensities to remove this sort of insincerity. On the contrary, if the candidate gets a positive share of the votes, a voter might skip him solely on the basis of his ordinal preferences. This second type of insincerity is a consequence of the correlation of the candidates’ scores. The incentives for sincerity of rank scoring rules are also discussed.

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