IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eth/wpswif/17-283.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Sophisticated Attacks on Decoy Ballots: A Devil's Menu and the Market for Lemons

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Gersbach

    (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

  • Akaki Mamageishvili

    (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

  • Oriol Tejada

    (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

Abstract

Decoy ballots do not count in election outcomes, but otherwise they are indistinguishable from real ballots. By means of a game-theoretical model, we show that decoy ballots may not provide e ective protection against a malevolent adversary trying to buy real ballots. If the citizenry is divided into subgroups (or districts), the adversary can construct a so-called "Devil's Menu" consisting of several prices. In equilibrium, the adversary can buy the real ballots of any strict subset of districts at a price corresponding to the willingness to sell on the part of the citizens holding such ballots. By contrast, decoy voters are trapped into selling their ballots at a low, or even negligible, price. Blowing up the adversary's budget by introducing decoy ballots may thus turn out to be futile. The Devil's Menu can also be applied to the well-known "Lemons Problem".

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Gersbach & Akaki Mamageishvili & Oriol Tejada, 2017. "Sophisticated Attacks on Decoy Ballots: A Devil's Menu and the Market for Lemons," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 17/283, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    • Handle: RePEc:eth:wpswif:17-283
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cer.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/mtec/cer-eth/cer-eth-dam/documents/working-papers/WP-17-283.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    voting; decoy votes; adversary; electronic voting; attacks; lemons market;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D4 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eth:wpswif:17-283. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iwethch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.