Reply to Ledyard's comment

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 95 KB
• Volume: 50
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-5829
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00124927

✦ Synopsis

I can readily endorse Ledyard's view that in Theorem 1 "we rediscover that if candidates are certain about voters' preferences ... then no equilibrium exists."

Indeed, I am quite happy to do so --since the purpose of that theorem was to capture (in a fully specified model) the "conventional wisdom" about elections with income redistribution. After this point, however, there is considerably less harmony in our views.

Ledyard claims that I "rediscover that ... if voters vote probabilistically then an equilibrium does exist (Theorem 2)." This conclusion, however, has never been discovered --nor can it be. (For an