We analyze a class of two-candidate voter participation games under complete information that encompasses as special cases certain public good provision games. We characterize the Nash equilibria of these games as stationary points of a non-linear programming problem, the objective function of which is a Morse function (one that does not admit degenerate critical points) for almost all costs of participation. We use this fact to establish that, outside a closed set of measure zero of participation costs, all equilibria of these games are regular (an alternative to the result of De Sinopoli and Iannantuoni, 2005). One consequence of regularity is that the equilibria of these games are robust to the introduction of (mild) incomplete information. Finally, we establish the existence of monotone Nash equilibria, such that players with higher participation cost abstain with (weakly) higher probability.
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Paper provided by University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy in its series Wallis Working Papers with number
WP40.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
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