Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2011

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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 eff ect 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.