Influential Opinion Leaders
Colin Stewart*, Jakub Steiner
Date: 2011-05-14 3:45 pm – 4:15 pm
Last modified: 2011-04-14
Abstract
We present a simple model of elections in which experts with special interests endorse candidates and endorsements are observed by the voters. We show that the equilibrium election outcome is biased towards the experts' interests even though voters know the distribution of expert interests and account for it when evaluating endorsements. Expert influence is fully decentralized in the sense that each individual expert has a negligible impact on voters. The effect arises when some agents prefer, ceteris paribus, to support the winning candidate and when experts are much better informed about the state of the world than are voters.