A Markov Voting Model with Farsighted Agents

In this paper I present a model of how individuals make voting decisions in the setting of a continuing program. In this setting, any policy enacted today becomes tomorrow’s status quo, and thus leads to a future stream of legislation which is to some extent dependent upon it. Decision-making is modeled as a Markov process in which agents value a given policy accord-ing to both the utility received from that policy and from the future policies it likely leads to. Alternatives to replace the status quo arise probabilisti-cally, where the likelihood of a policy defeating the status quo at time is weighted by the players ’ time valuations over these alternatives. One implication is that when policy selection is viewed as a dynamic process in which agents are aware that any current policy will eventually be replaced by a new alternative, a player’s “value”of a given policy, or expected sum of utility once that policy is enacted, is not necessarily monotone in the util-ity received from that policy. Another implication is that the distribution of other players ’ payoffs is integral to every player’s value of a given policy