微观理论workshop：

The Economics of Partisan Gerrymandering

主讲人: Alexander Wolitzky(Professor, MIT)

主持老师: （经院）吴泽南、石凡奇；（国发院）胡岠

参与老师: （经院）胡涛、吴泽南、石凡奇；（国发院）汪浩、胡岠

题目: The Economics of Partisan Gerrymandering

时间：2021年3月25日（周四）9:30-11:00

地点：线上（会议号附在文末）

报告摘要：

In the United States, the boundaries of congressional districts are often drawn by political partisans. In the resulting partisan gerrymandering problem, a designer partitions voters into equal-sized districts with the goal of winning as many districts as possible. When the designer can perfectly predict how each individual will vote, the solution is to pack unfavorable voters into homogeneous districts and crack favorable voters across districts that each contain a bare majority of favorable voters. We study the more realistic case where the designer faces both aggregate and individual-level uncertainty, provide conditions under which appropriate generalizations of the pack and crack solution remain optimal, and analyze comparative statics. All districting plans that we find to be optimal are equivalent to special cases of "segregate-pair districting," a generalization of pack and crack where all sufficiently unfavorable voter types are segregated in homogeneous districts, and the remaining types are matched in a negatively assortative pattern. Methodologically, we exploit a mathematical connection between gerrymandering---partitioning voters into districts---and information design---partitioning states of the world into signals.

主讲人简介：

Alexander Wolitzky is a professor of economics at MIT. His research is in microeconomic theory, game theory, and political economy, and covers topics such as repeated games, reputation formation, mechanism design, bargaining, conflict, institutions, and networks.  He received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2011 and has previously held positions as a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and as an assistant professor of economics at Stanford.  His research has been supported by an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan fellowship. He has published extensively in leading academic journals, such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy and Review of Economic Studies.

形式：ZOOM会议

会议号：966 5220 5370

密码：258024