1. Will the results of this year’s presidential election confirm or disprove the median voter theorem?
2. Further questions:
(a) How do we determine who the “median voter” is in the real world, and along which policy dimension do we measure his or her political preferences?
(b) How does the act of not voting (i.e. “none of the above”) relate to the median voter model? Specifically, do median voters abstain more frequently than voters closer to the extremes?
(c) Are presidential politics to complex to be amenable to formal mathematical models?


* Perhaps Question 2a can be rephrased as “In Hotelling’s model, how do we know where the center of the beach is?”
* And Question 2b, “Does the lack of interest by some beach-goers in the ice cream flavors being offered affect the placement of ice-cream stands on the beach?”
Great explanatory video for those of us who did not know about this theorem.
Yes, we learned this theorem for the first time in the summer of 2007 in a formal mathematical modeling seminar taught by NYU professor Rebecca Morton. We wished we had learned it earlier!
Can you please remove my name from your post: Mandi B. My video is no longer available. My school was posting my assignment and I had it removed. Thank you.
Ok, will do!
Done.