One of the readings for Guillermo's class this week is by some theorists who obviously have a sense of humor. I appreciate it.. Below, they talk about the median voter result (and its origins in Hotelling and Smithies.
The firms might be hot-dog vendors with wheeled carts selling identical hot-dogs at identical prices along a beach. In the case of two vendors, the predicction of Hotelling and Mithies was that the vendors locate cheek-by-jowl at the median sunbather. No other configuration can be an equilibrium.... To compare the situation being analyzed to political interaction we need to spell out the assumptions underlying the two-vendor hot-dog game. (1) Vendors, and hot-dogs, are identical save for their positions along the boardwalk. People choose by minimizing the walk from beach blanket to wiener wagon. (2) Movement is free, and it is clear what movement means: the physical location of the cart changes along the single dimension of the beach. No frauds, such as creating mirages to make one cart seem closer, are possible..... (3) The distribution of hungry sunbathers is exogenous, and does not change in response to movements or fixed locations of hot-dog vendors.. (One might easily imagine a situation where this is not the case: 'where will we put our beach blanket? Oh, let us go bover beside that wurst-monger!' the result might well be two vendors, separated by a very considerable distance, each surrounded by a cluster of obese but sated sunbathers on an otherwise empty beach.... The frankfurter purchase is a one-shot deal. Once we have recieved the hot-dog and examined it, we pay for it, assuming the vendor will not snatch the steaming tube steak and abscond. But all these problems of reneging and ex post recontracting exist for politicians.
Oh, and footnote 10: "This is not to say that some politicans are not hot dogs."
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