Return to search

Information and politics

This thesis consists of four independent essays, which consider different topics in information economics and political economy. The first two papers are variants of the same idea. An uninformed principal, e.g., a government, will make a decision. In order to gain more information it may consult two experts; however, these experts have a private interest in certain policies being implemented. The question is, to gain as much information as possible, should the principal consult experts who are biased in the same direction, or experts who prefer different decisions? The main result is that, as long as collusion between experts can be prevented, homogeneous panels are superior to heterogeneous ones, and this advantage increases with the experts’ informational precision. In the third paper, two firms consider entry in a new product market and must decide when to enter the market and how to design their product. Firms do not know for certain what the best design is, so both firms want to outwait the other’s decision in order to gain more information. The focus of the paper is on which firm will make the first decision. The main result is that if products are strong (strategic) substitutes, the worst informed firm makes the first decision in equilibrium. The analysis should apply to a range of other contexts, such as investors’ trading decisions or the policy choices of political candidates. The final paper asks the following question: Could it be that parties in a two-party system may benefit from using several candidates in the same election? To promote the use of multiple candidates, I assume that a party never runs the risk of having its votes split up among its candidates. Despite this, it turns out that parties have a strong incentive to restrict their number of nominees. Paradoxically, it seems that the more uncertain parties are about voter opinion, the fewer candidates they want to use. In particular, with a uniform voter distribution the optimal number of candidates is one. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2001 S. v-vii: sammanfattning, s. 1-72: 4 uppsatser

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hhs-601
Date January 2001
CreatorsFrisell, Lars
PublisherHandelshögskolan i Stockholm, Samhällsekonomi (S), Stockholm : Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics (Ekonomiska forskningsinstitutet vid Handelshögsk.) (EFI)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDoctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Page generated in 0.0023 seconds