On participation games with complete information (Q870757)

A class of two-candidate voter participation games under complete information is studied that encompasses as special cases certain public good provision games. The Nash equilibria of these games are characterized as stationary points of a non-linear programming problem, the objective function of which is a Morse function (one that does not admit degenerate critical points) for almost all costs of participation. This fact is used to establish that, outside a closed set of measure zero of participation costs, all equilibria of these games are regular [an alternative to the result of \textit{F. De Sinopoli} and \textit{G. Iannantuoni}, in Econ. Theory 25, No. 2, 477--486 (2005; Zbl 1107.91006)]. One consequence of regularity is that the equilibria of these games are robust to the introduction of (mild) incomplete information. The existence of monotone Nash equilibria is also established, where the players with a higher participation cost abstain with (weakly) higher probability.