Information Disclosure in Elections with Sequential Costly Participation

Abstract

Using a pivotal costly voting model of elections in which voters privately have formed preferences over two candidates and act sequentially, I study how different rules for disclosing information about the actions of early voters affect the actions of later voters, and how they ultimately affect voters’ and candidates’ welfare. Comparing three rules observed in real-life elections (no information disclosure, turnout disclosure and vote count disclosure), I find that vote count disclosure dominates the other two rules in terms of both voter welfare and the ex-ante likelihood of electing the candidate preferred by the majority. I show further that each of the rules can provide a candidate with either a greater or lesser chance of winning, depending on the levels of ex-ante support for the candidates. The findings may be useful for designing optimal voting procedures, particularly in settings with small numbers of voters. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.