On participation games with complete information

Abstract

We analyze a class of two-candidate voter participation games under complete information that encompasses as special cases certain public good provision games. We characterize the Nash equilibria of these games as stationary points of a non-linear programming problem, the objective function of which is a Morse function (onethat does not admit degenerate critical points) for almost all costs of participation. We use this fact to establish that, outside a closed set of measure zero of participation costs, all equilibria of these games are regular (an alternative to the result of De Sinopoli and Iannantuoni in Econ Theory 25(2):477–486, 2005). One consequence of regularity is that the equilibria of these games are robust to the introduction of (mild) incomplete information. Finally, we establish the existence of monotone Nash equilibria, such that players with higher participation cost abstain with (weakly) higher probability.