Research

Publications

1. Public Goods Bargaining under Mandatory and Discretionary Rules: Experimental Evidence (with John Duffy), Experimental Economics 27 (2024), 175-214.

   • Abstract: We experimentally test a model of public good bargaining due to Bowen et al. (Am Econ Rev 104:2941–2974, 2014) and compare two institutions governing bargaining over public good allocations. The setup involves two parties negotiating the distribution of a fixed endowment between a public good and each party’s individual account. Parties attach either high or low weight to the public good and the difference in these weights reflects the degree of polarization. Under discretionary bargaining rules, the status quo default allocation to the group account (in the event of disagreement) is zero while under the mandatory bargaining rule it is equal to the level last agreed upon. The mandatory rule thus creates a dynamic relationship between current decisions and future payoffs, and our experiment tests the theoretical prediction that the efficient level of public good is provided under the mandatory rule while the level of public good funding is at a sub-optimal level under the discretionary rule. Consistent with the theory, we find that proposers (particularly those attaching high weight to the public good) propose significantly greater allocations to the public good under mandatory rules than under discretionary rules and this result is strengthened with an increase in polarization. Still, public good allocations under mandatory rules fall short of steady state predictions, primarily due to fairness concerns that prevent proposers from exercising full proposer power. 

2. Voting with Endogenous Information Acquisition: Experimental Evidence (with Sourav Bhattacharya and John Duffy), Games and Economic Behavior 102 (2017), 316-338.

   • • Abstract: The Condorcet jury model with costless but informative signals about the true state of the world predicts that the efficiency of group decision-making increases unambiguously with the group size. However, if signal acquisition is made an endogenous and costly decision, then rational voters have disincentives to purchase information as the group size becomes larger. We investigate the extent to which human subjects recognize this trade-off between better information aggregation and greater incentives to free-ride in a laboratory experiment where we vary the group size, the cost of information acquisition and the precision of signals. We find that the theory predicts well in the case of precise signals. However, when signals are imprecise, free-riding incentives appear to be much weaker as there is a pronounced tendency for subjects to over-acquire information relative to equilibrium predictions. We rationalize the latter finding using a quantal response equilibrium that allows for risk aversion.

3. Compulsory versus Voluntary Voting: An Experimental Study (with Sourav Bhattacharya and John Duffy), Games and Economic Behavior 84 (2014), 111-131. Online Appendix

   • • Abstract: We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely, i.e., against their private information. If voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed, then sincere voting in accordance with a voter's private information is always rational while participation may become strategic. We find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data. Moreover, voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible. The latter finding may serve to rationalize the co-existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature.

Working Papers

1. Can Partisan News Shift Political Preference and Voting Behavior? Experimental Evidence from Taiwan's General Elections 2016 (with Chun-Fang Chiang, Semin Kim, Chien-Hsun Lin and Ming-Jen Lin), Oct. 2020 (Appendix)

   • • Abstract: We conduct an experiment to investigate the effects of partisan news on the 2016 Taiwan presidential and legislative elections. Subjects are randomly divided into four groups: KMT (the ruling party), DPP (the opposition party), Third-Party and Control, and provided with distinct partisan news articles. We incentivize subjects' readings of the assigned articles by payments according to quiz scores. We find that reading partisan news articles have increased support for intended target presidential candidates and decreased support for competing candidates. Our treatments have reinforced subjects' existing preferences in presidential voting while the treatments have changed their voting intentions in party voting. The reason is because the treatment articles don't provide completely new information for the candidates from the well-known major parties in Taiwan while they are able to provide novel information for new third parties.

2. Policy Divergence with Post-Electoral Bargaining, Nov. 2011

   • • Abstract: We study a Downsian model of two party (leftist vs. rightist) electoral competition over one-dimensional policy space. In a departure, our model assumes that the final policy outcome is determined not by the winner's electoral platform but by a bargaining process between the winning party and its opponent. We consider a simple bargaining protocol in which the winning party must give the losing party policy concessions, proportional to the latter party's vote share. In particular, the amount of concessions is assumed to be an increasing function of the losing party's vote share. When the losing party can obtain relatively large policy concessions with a given vote share, both parties have to announce extremely divergent platforms at any symmetric pure strategy equilibrium. If the bargaining environment doesn't allow a sufficiently large amount of concessions, then there may not exist a pure-strategy equilibrium, but a mixed-strategy equilibrium can still be shown to exist. We finally establish the existence of a mixed equilibrium with continuous density strategies where two parties mix over separate sets of policies.

Work in progress

1. An Experimental Study of Proposal Power in Legislative Bargaining (with Enseen Tang)

   • Abstract: In this paper we experimentally investigate factors that affect the proposal power in Baron-Ferejohn legislative bargaining experiments. As is shown in the previous literature about experimental bargaining, we find that proposal power is smaller than what the equilibrium model predicts. However, the proposal power of legislators decreases in the extent to which people value the future payoffs (discount factor), increases in the number of bargaining group size (competition effect), and appears greater under simple majority than unanimity rule. Our study thus confirms the comparative static predictions of rational-choice model of multilateral bargaining and suggests simple but important controls for proposer behavior.