How to Buy an Election?--A Study of Vote-buying Schemes in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Wang, Shinn-Shyr, 王信實
• Other Authors: Wu, Ho-Mou
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1994
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25787139082706013584

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 經濟學研究所 === 82 === Because it is difficult for the candidate who is buying votes to verify whether the commodity he purchased -the vote- is actually delivered or not, we show that a scheme involving the use of a lottery on the outcome of an election can be designed to overcome this kind of information asymmetry so as to establish a market for buying and selling votes in this paper. We study the conditions under which the market for votes can be established. We show that for this scheme to work, the payoff ratio should be much higher than what the prior probability of winning would imply for a fair bet. Once they purchase the lottery tickets, the voters face a situation effectively equiva- lent to what the employees would face with an incentive contract where the compensations are contingent on the realized revenues of the employer. We note that the tickets should be designed to be more "unfair" when the voters are more risk averse. We also show that once they purchase the tickets, the voters will spend positive amount of effort to cast their own votes or even campaign for the candidate who issue the tickets. The lottery tickets ensure that the voters actually have incentives to deliver their votes. The kind of information asymmetry mentioned before is effectively dealt with through the lottery. For the candidate, the buyer in this market, he should design the price or payoff ratio and other features of the tickets in some effective way to overcome other kinds of information barriers. The lottery tickets must be "unfair" and the issuer will lose money in the end. The amount of total loss is the cost of vote-buying. We will consider whether it is optimal for the candidate to design a rationing scheme for the purchase of lottery tickets.