A note on pivotality (Q2184006)

Summary: This note provides simple derivations of the equilibrium conditions for different voting games with incomplete information. In the standard voting game à la \textit{D. Austen-Smith} and \textit{J. Banks} [``Information aggregation, rationality, and the Condorcet jury theorem'', Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 90, No. 1, 34--45 (1996; \url{doi:10.2307/2082796})], voters update their beliefs, and, conditional on their being pivotal, cast their votes. However, in voting games such as those of \textit{A. Ellis} [Theor. Econ. 11, No. 3, 865--895 (2016; Zbl 1395.91157)] and \textit{S. Fabrizi}, \textit{S. Lippert}, \textit{A. Pan} and \textit{M. Ryan} [``Unanimous jury voting with an ambiguous likelihood'', Auckland: University of Auckland (2019)], given a closed and convex set of priors, ambiguity-averse voters would select a prior from this set in a strategy-contingent manner. As a consequence, both the pivotal and non-pivotal events matter to voters when deciding their votes. In this note, I demonstrate that for ambiguous voting games the conditional probability of being pivotal alone is no longer sufficient to determine voters' best responses.