Predicting Outcomes in Five Person Spatial Games: An Aspiration Model Approach - a podcast by MCMP Team

Bernard Grofman (Irvine) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (13 May, 2015) titled "Predicting Outcomes in Five Person Spatial Games: An Aspiration Model Approach". Abstract: There are many situations where voters must choose a single alternative and where both the voters and the alternatives can be characterized as points in a one or two or more dimensional policy space. In committees and legislatures, often choice among these alternatives will be done via a decision agenda in which alternatives are eliminated until a choice is made, sometimes requiring a final vote against the status quo. A common form for such an agenda is what has been called by Black (1958) standard amendment procedure, a “king of the hill” procedure in which there is an initial alternative who is paired against another alternative, with the winner of that pairwise contest becoming the new winner, and the processes continuing until either the set of feasible alternatives is exhausted or there is a successful motion for cloture. Beginning with a seminal experiment on five person voting games conducted by Plott and Fiorina (1978), there have been a number of experiments on committee voting games with an potentially infinite set of alternatives embedded in a two dimensional policy space. In games where there is a core, i.e., an alternative which, for an odd number of voters, can defeat each and every other alternative in paired comparison, outcomes at or near the core are chosen, but there is also considerable clustering of outcomes even in games without a core. A major concern of the literature has been to develop models to explain the pattern of that clustering in non-core situations. Here, after reviewing the present state of the art, we offer a new family of models based on the Siegel-Simon aspiration approach, in which voters satisfice by choosing “acceptable” alternative, and the set of outcomes that are considered acceptable by each voter changes as the game continues.

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