Abstract (EN)

In strategic candidacy games, both voters and candidates have preferences over the set of candidates, and candidates make strategic decisions about whether to run an electoral campaign or withdraw from the election, in order to manipulate the outcome according to their preferences. In this work, we extend the standard model of strategic candidacy games to scenarios where candidates may find it harmful for their reputation to withdraw from the election and would only do so if their withdrawal changes the election outcome for the better; otherwise, they would be keen to run the campaign. We study the existence and the quality of Nash equilibria in the resulting class of games, both analytically and empirically, and compare them with the Nash equilibria of the standard model. Our results demonstrate that while in the worst case there may be none or multiple, bad quality equilibria, on average, these games have a unique, optimal equilibrium state.