Making Elections Work: Accountability with Selection and Control
研究了选民在不确定政治家特征和行为时，如何通过选举机制实现接近最优的问责效果，并证明选择与控制之间未必存在权衡。
We study the limits of dynamic electoral accountability when voters are uncertain about politicians’ characteristics (adverse selection) and their actions (moral hazard). Existing work argues that voters cannot achieve their first-best payoff. This is attributed to inherent deficiencies of the electoral contract, including voters’ inability to precommit, and the restriction to a binary retention-replacement decision. We provide conditions under which voters can, despite these constraints, obtain arbitrarily close to the first-best payoff in an equilibrium of the electoral interaction. Our paper resolves that there need not be a trade-off between selection and control.