On the resource allocation for political campaigns

Abstract

In an election campaign, candidates must decide how to optimally allocate their efforts/resources optimally among the regions of a country. As a result, the outcome of the election will depend on the players' strategies and the voters' preferences. In this work, we present a zero-sum game where two candidates decide how to invest a fixed resource in a set of regions, while considering their sizes and biases. We explore the two voting systems, the Majority System (MS) and the Electoral College (EC). We prove equilibrium existence and uniqueness under MS in a deterministic model; in addition, their closed form expressions are provided when fixing the subset of regions and relaxing the non-negative investing constraint. For the stochastic case, we use Monte Carlo simulations to compute the players' payoffs. For the EC, given the lack of equilibrium in pure strategies, we propose an iterative algorithm to find equilibrium in mixed strategies in a subset of the simplex lattice. We illustrate numerical instances under both election systems, and contrast players' equilibrium strategies. We show that polarization induces candidates to focus on larger regions with negative biases under MS, whereas candidates concentrate on swing states under EC. Finally, we calibrate the analyzed models with real data from the US 2020 presidential election.