Formal Models of Sequential Voting and Sequential Elections

从安东尼·唐斯(Anthony Down，1957)和邓肯·布莱克(Duncan Black，1958)的著作开始，大量关于大规模选举中的投票和委员会投票的文献已经发展起来，它们使用博弈论的数学工具来增强我们对政治的理解。由于这些政治活动通常以无记名投票方式进行，考虑到选民同时投票，因此这项关于投票空间模型的工作也就不足为奇了。对于无记名投票，投票的顺序无关紧要，因为最后一名选民并不比第一名选民获得更多关于其他选票的信息。然而，几种重要类型的选举本质上是连续的；较晚的选民可以观察较早选民的投票或选举结果。这项提案调查了这些信息差异对投票顺序较晚的选民行为的影响。这项研究开发了一个正式的模型，在这个模型中，选民从关于候选人质量的私人信息开始。选民可以用从序列中较早的投票中得出的推论来补充这些信息。这一模型的几个扩展被开发出来，捕捉到了总统提名过程的一些独特特征。

Beginning with the works of Anthony Downs (1957) and Duncan Black (1958), a large literature on voting in mass elections and voting in committees has developed that uses the mathematical tools of game theory to enhance our understanding of politics. As these political events are often conducted by secret ballot, it is not surprising that this work on spatial models of voting has taken as given that voters cast their ballots simultaneously. With a secret ballot, the order in which votes are cast is irrelevant because the last voter has no more information about the other ballots than the first voter. However, several important types of elections are sequential in nature; later voters can observe the votes or election results of earlier voters. This proposal investigates the effect that these informational differences have on the behavior of voters who are late in the voting sequence. This research develops a formal model in which voters start with private information about the quality of the candidates. Voters can supplement this information with inferences drawn from earlier votes in the sequence. Several extensions of this model are developed that capture some of the unique features of the presidential nominating process.