Political motivations and electoral competition: equilibrium analysis and experimental evidence (Q2437169)

The authors investigate Nash equilibria for a two-candidate election game under the assumption that the candidates might have different motivations for seeking office. Specifically, a parameter is added to measure the extent to which a candidate is seeking office for the benefits of winning the office as opposed to gaining the ability to enact a certain agenda. Questions of candidate motivation have been addressed before, but here, the authors specifically address the case where one candidate's motivation is independent of the other's. This creates an asymmetry in the payoff functions for the two candidates, since a candidate who is more motivated by the office itself has more incentive to compromise their ideological position to increase their chances of winning. The analysis shows that these assumptions lead to the possibility of a ``one-sided equilibrium'', where two ideologically opposed candidates assume different positions on the same side of the ideological spectrum. The authors describe the possible equilibria in all cases, and discuss the results of an experiment designed to test the predictions of the model.