Abstract
We consider a political candidate campaigning to be elected. Her chances of being elected will depend on how various groups of voters perceive her, and how they perceive her will depend on what she has said. Different groups of voters may have different preferences and a statement preferred by one group of voters may be disliked by another. Moreover, voters may be optimistic (willing to think the best of the candidate), pessimistic (inclined to expect the worse), or expected value voters, who average over various possibilities which may come about if she is elected. Given these considerations, what should she say? We formalize this problem in propositional logic with certain utility values, and certain intensities of preference for various groups of voters, and show that if the voters are expected value voters, then she is best off being as explicit as possible. Thus a reluctance to be explicit may come about as a result of the presence of optimistic voters.
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Dean, W., Parikh, R. (2011). The Logic of Campaigning. In: Banerjee, M., Seth, A. (eds) Logic and Its Applications. ICLA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6521. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18026-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18026-2_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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