Long Term Policy Goals Under Electoral Competition Given Varied Temporal Discount Rates Among Voters
Name
Nicholas-saranich-meng-eecs-2022-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
1.13 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
81c50dc69cf9d5841fe785a21fea9d2a
Author(s)
Nicholas, Sara
Advisor(s)
Magazinnik, Asya
Date Issued
May 2022
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Many important issues facing the world involve temporal tradeoffs, requiring costly investment in the short term for payoffs that accrue much later. However, politicians facing frequent elections are held accountable to voter preferences, where voters tend to be myopic, making investment difficult. Further, the costs and benefits of an investment are often distributed unevenly across voters. Thus investments take a two dimensional shape, creating both cross-sectional and inter-temporal distributions of utility. This paper examines under what conditions investment can occur, and studies how different levels and types of investments distribute utility. We develop a model involving multiple voting districts with variable time preferences and model a game involving legislative action followed by an election, solving the game via backward induction to find the subgame perfect Nash equilibria.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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