Your Vote Could Be Worth Cash

In the realm of politics, logrolling is the process of trading votes in order to obtain the passage of specific interests. While the formal buying and selling of votes is illegal, informal vote trading occurs often because it is hard to police. By revealing their preferences through an exchange, individuals can increase their chances of winning on the more important issues to them and potentially increased their realized gains. If vote trading is a voluntary exchange, then why could this be an issue?

This article in ABCNews discusses an internet site that sells blocks of votes to interest groups that hope to influence the election. The founder of the website, James Baumgartner, a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, claims that corporations and individuals are already influencing voters with their money through external means and that his website, voteauction.net, is simply "a more direct method of doing that." The voteauction.net website offered US citizens the ability to sell their vote to the highest bidder in the 2000 presidential elections. Voters would fill out absentee ballots based on voteauction.net's recommendations, send them to Baumgartner to look over, and then Baumgartner sent the ballots to the polling places. In return, the voters would get cash.  After several US states issued temporary restraining orders for alleged illegal vote trading, the system was shut down. The article goes on to list several issues with the process - in addition to its illegality. For example, the votes are overpriced, much more than the market rates. The larger issue brought up is the increasing lack of interest that voters are showing in our political process. Bob Murch, an electoral historian, says that people "no longer see any value in their votes." The low voter turnout rates and selling of their votes on the internet reinforce this idea.

The Economics Behind 'The Bachelor Pad'

Of the many hours I wasted watching the Bachelor Pad, I have found a way to gain some value from it—blog about it. This show relies on the economics of public choice in order to create unpredictability and drama. For those of you that are not familiar with it, it’s a TV show in which past bachelors and bachelorettes (From the TV shows of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette) compete for $250,000 and a chance of finding love along the way. At the end of each week an elimination ceremony takes place where all of the women vote individually on the man they would like to eliminate and the men do the same for the women. .

Right off the bat, the contestants divided into the “insiders” (contestants that knew each other before the show) and the “outsiders”. As a result, the women of the insider group would collaborate with the men on the insider group in order to see which man they should voted off. In return for granting the insider-men their wish, the men would place their vote based on what the insider-women requested. The outsider’s did the same. I think this is a great example of logrolling. These mutual agreements lead to both sides (men and women) gaining a better chance at achieving their preferences. Furthermore, just as Mueller describes it in Chapter 5.9, the bluffing problem certainly made its appearance on the Bachelor Pad, creating a good amount of drama. .

Mueller also mentions the problem that occurs when voting is done in sequence, as was the case on the Bachelor Pad. The holdout problem proved to be a very popular strategy for some contestants. Many times right before the last contestant was going to place his/her vote, the contestant most worried about being voted off would strike deals with the last voter. For example, Kip was on the verge of being sent home and Nikki was the last women to vote leaving Kips fate in her hands. Kip bargained with here by promising his loyalty to her in the future—a benefit Nikki only received because she was the last voter.

Finally, at the end of the show only one woman (Natalie) and one man (Dave) were left standing. Natalie and Dave were sent into separate rooms and were given the decision to either share the money or to keep it all to themselves. Who would receive the money was decided in the following manner:

• If both Natalie and Dave decided to keep the money, neither would receive it and the quarter million dollars would be divided among all other Bachelor Pad contestants.

• If one of them decided to share and the other decided to keep the money, the person that chose ‘keep’ would receive the whole $250,000.

• If both decided to share the money, each would receive half of the $250,000.

This is a typical prisoner’s dilemma. In class we discussed that the dominant strategy would be for both of them to decide to keep the money, which would leave both with nothing. However, if there are other convincing incentives put in place (like an inmate breaking the leg of the person who confesses) then this may be avoided. So the burning question the show left its viewers with was whether “love” was enough of an incentive for both Natalie and Dave to decide to share the money. I’ll leave it at that…