This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...

This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamicsof electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters' reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of...

This paper considers the implications of an important cognitive bias in information processing, confirmation bias, in a political agency setting. In the baseline two-period case where only the politician's actions are observable before the election, we show that when voters have this bias, it...