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Working
Paper Series:
07.17
QRE, NSNX and the Paradox of Voting
Howard Margolis
Abstract:
Levine & Palfrey's (2007) QRE account of turnout in large elections raises the
broader question of how much of a departure from standard rational choice theory is
justified by the considerable repertoire of rational choice anomalies that has accumulated
since Downs and Olson half a century ago. An alternative but more controversial
unconventional view turns on what I call NSNX motivation to account for how agents
seek a balance between self-interest and social motivation. NSNX agents have
irreducibly dual utility functions. QRE agents have a standard utility function but they do
not maximize it. I review the situation showing why in situations where NSNX effects
could be expected, QRE might mirror those effects. I show how by varying parameters
of an experiment we can cleanly distinguish between actual QRE effects which should
bring predictions closer to the data than Nash and NSNX effects which should do the
same.
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