> Game theorists are always asking why people vote, because the likelihood that you are going to be what we call a pivotal voter—a voter that changes the election—is basically zero. Yet still people are participating.
Is this really an open question? It sounds simple to me. Your vote raises the likelihood that someone from your party becomes the pivotal voter by a tiny amount. It's like increasing your share on a pie chart when someone is blindly shooting at it and the color that gets hit wins. People care about their candidate winning, not about personally deciding the election.
And because you can't know when a pivotal voter is needed.
Here in Oslo, the local elections some years ago was decided by six votes out of about 300k votes (~500k eligible), between a left-leaning majority and a right-leaning majority.
in this Israeli election, an individual voter likely has an O(1-in-a-million) chance of swinging the election one way or the other (ie the chance that their vote brings their party another seat, which ends up being pivotal to the coalition; source: chatgpt simulation)
it's not hard to come up with an aggregate social welfare valuation of many billions of dollars for this election, especially considering the effects on non-Israelis also
So here the case for voting, at a cost of thousands of dollars, is rather straightforwardly rational, assuming only that one is somewhat unselfish; and possibly even if one is selfish the individual stakes could be equivalent to thousands of dollars
> Game theorists are always asking why people vote, because the likelihood that you are going to be what we call a pivotal voter—a voter that changes the election—is basically zero. Yet still people are participating.
Is this really an open question? It sounds simple to me. Your vote raises the likelihood that someone from your party becomes the pivotal voter by a tiny amount. It's like increasing your share on a pie chart when someone is blindly shooting at it and the color that gets hit wins. People care about their candidate winning, not about personally deciding the election.
And because you can't know when a pivotal voter is needed.
Here in Oslo, the local elections some years ago was decided by six votes out of about 300k votes (~500k eligible), between a left-leaning majority and a right-leaning majority.
It's often close but not that close.
in this Israeli election, an individual voter likely has an O(1-in-a-million) chance of swinging the election one way or the other (ie the chance that their vote brings their party another seat, which ends up being pivotal to the coalition; source: chatgpt simulation)
it's not hard to come up with an aggregate social welfare valuation of many billions of dollars for this election, especially considering the effects on non-Israelis also
So here the case for voting, at a cost of thousands of dollars, is rather straightforwardly rational, assuming only that one is somewhat unselfish; and possibly even if one is selfish the individual stakes could be equivalent to thousands of dollars
https://archive.is/20261024104541/https://www.newyorker.com/...