Election Promises and Prisoners’ Dilemma

Its election time again. Every time there is an election, people are taken to a fantasy land by political rhetoric. Promises are galore from both sides. Astounding salary increases, price reduction of goods, best education for children, best jobs for the educated, homes for the homeless, help for the needy, and the list goes on. If election promises made over the years were actually fulfilled, there is no doubt that Sri Lanka would be the most prosperous state known to mankind.

Lying Vs. truth telling

Why is it that completely unrealistic promises are given during election times? In other words why so much lying? After all these lies (false promises), one party is going to lose anyway. And the winning party will have to carry the burden of its unrealistic promises to a certain extent. For example, failure to deliver, leads to considerable amounts of public dissent and provides ammunition for the opposition? If lying is going to hurt in the long run, why do politicians lie? Wouldn’t it make better sense for both candidates to be honest and truthful? One would win anyway and there will be no false hopes...

Equilibrium of politics

As far as election promises go, politicians have (mainly) two choices: tell the truth (promises that can be delivered) or lie. Assuming a race between two candidates, Figure 1 summarizes this simple choice. The first term in parenthesis shows the choice of politician 1 and the second that of politician 2. For example (Tell truth, Tell truth) indicates both decide to tell the truth while (Lie, Tell truth) indicates politician 1 lies, but the politician 2 tells the truth. Essentially, the choices available are; 1. Both tell the truth (quadrant 1) 2. Both lie (quadrant 4) 3. Only one tells the truth and the other lies (quadrants 2 and 3)
Given that truth telling is likely to be better in the long run and both parties lose even when both of them lie, the optimum outcome is likely to be that in quadrant 1: That is both parties tell the truth and do not create false hopes. However, what we observe in every election is more close to the outcome in quadrant 4: That is both parties end up lying (giving unfulfillable election promises). Why is it that the equilibrium (observed) outcome is different from the optimum outcome? The phenomenon of Prisoners’ Dilemma, a paradox discussed in game theory may explain.

Prisoners’ dilemma

Prisoners’ dilemma is a centerpiece problem in the branch of economics known as game theory. The idea was initially presented by Dr. Merrill Flood and Dr. Melvin Dresher in 1950 and was formalized by Prof. Albert Tucker of Princeton University. The problem goes as follows:
Two criminals commit a crime and the police arrest them as suspects. Police lack sufficient evidence to convict them, unless at least one confesses. The Police hold the suspects in separate cells and explain the consequences that will follow from the actions they could take. If neither confesses, then both will be convicted of a minor offence and sentenced to one month in jail. If both confess, then both will be sentenced to jail for six months. Finally if one confesses but the other does not, then confessor will be made a prosecuting witness and be released immediately, but the other will be sent to nine months in jail ( six for the crime and further three for obstructing justice).
Similar to Figure 1, Figure 2 shows the decision matrix for prisoners’ dilemma. Additionally, the jail sentences involved with each are given below the decisions (Since jail sentences are undesirable they are shown as negatives). For example, (-1, -1) in quadrant 1 indicates that if neither one confesses, each will be sentenced to one month in jail since Police does not have evidence to convict them on the main crime.
The optimum outcome will be achieved if both do not confess since this strategy minimizes the total jail time. However, the observed outcome would be both to confess and receive jail term of six months each. Clearly, both parties are worse of by making this decision. If so, how does this emerge as the equilibrium? The secret is in quadrants 2 and 3. Each party fears that even if he does not confess, the other will and sees that he will get 9 months prison term, if this turns out to be the case. As a result, each one confesses and ends up getting lengthy jail sentences.

Politicians’ dilemma

In the authors’ view, politicians too face the prisoners’ dilemma during election times. They may not be enjoying making lofty promises that cannot be fulfilled. Just like you and me, given the chance they prefer telling the truth. But they see that if one does not lie, the other candidate will win the election. Therefore, in order to create some chance of winning, they have no choice but to lie and match (or do better than) the other party’s lies.
And the sad part is that, for this (Lie, Lie) equilibrium to emerge, all the voters need not be fooled by false promises. As long as some of them are fooled (you can fool some people all the time!) and this portion of voter base is potentially larger than the ones who will see through the lies and vote for a truth telling candidate as mark of protest, politicians will have incentives to lie knowing well that it may hurt them in the long run. (It is important to note that not all voters who will see through the lies will vote for someone else as a mark of protest.) In other words, politicians lie not because they want to, but because they know that the other party will!

Solutions

Finally what are the solutions for this problem? Can we achieve the desirable outcome where each party only gives promises they can fulfill? Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions for this problem. As long as there are no effective mechanisms to hold politicians accountable and true to their words, this type of behavior will be seen from all candidates from all parties. And devising and enforcing such mechanisms is not an easy task.
(The example of Prisoners’’ dilemma was adopted from “Game Theory for Applied Economists” by Prof. Robert Gibbons [Princeton University Press 1992])

Tharindra is currently reading for his PhD at Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, USA. tharindrar@gmail.com