Flip-Flopping Republican Endorsements (A Game Theoretic Examination)
This article examines the flip-flopping of Republican endorsement of their presumptive candidate for the election to be President of the United States, Donald Trump. It notes that the seemingly indecisive flip-flopping on the part of Republicans can be explained by economic and game theory. It is important to note that most politicians want to look “prescient”, as Professor Zollman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies game theory, puts it. Therefore, this explains the incentive for politicians to call out their endorsements or un-endorsements alike, as early as they are certain of it. However, once we allow time to be a factor, in real world situations such as the saga of Donald Trump’s leaked lewd comments about women in 2005, the equilibrium is disturbed, and therefore many Republicans rushed to unendorse him.
As we have established, there was this rush to unendorse Trump, due to the fact that they wanted to be the first ones who publicly declared their stances, to be able to tell the public in the future that “Look, I was one of the first few who saw this coming and made a decisive move against him.” In other words, they themselves are acting in their own self-interest in order to further their own political careers. In economic literature, the rush to unendorse Trump can be classified as an “information cascade”. Once the news was out there, and the first few people had made their move, it was then “acceptable” for everyone to take their true positions, therefore causing the rush of people to leave.
Only, the exodus of support never really happened. The interesting thing in this situation was that despite many people figuring that the tape would be the watershed moment for Trump, that there was no way back for him, the cascade of unendorsements suddenly stopped, and in fact went in the opposite direction. This could be attributed to Trump’s action in this “game”, where he brought forth a significant and credible threat against the first few people to unendorse him. His aggressiveness in attacking the members of the Party who left his side signalled to the rest of the Party that he was serious and genuine in his intent to ruin the careers of those who did not support him, and this scared some of the party members back into line.
Ultimately, this Presidential campaign is an extremely interesting and exciting example of game theory unfolding in real life. It also showcases the limitations of the theories that we study in class: we hold many things constant and have several assumptions in our studies of game theory in class to make things simple, but as we see in real life, the factor of time and agent dynamism makes the field a very intriguing area of research.