[EL] “Flaws in the Efficiency Gap”

[Alan Miller]

Hi everyone.

I just want to bring to your attention a new paper that I've co-authored
with Chris Chambers and Joel Sobel. The paper examines the efficiency gap
and identifies several aspects that we consider to be significant flaws.
For the most part, our criticisms do not appear elsewhere in the literature
that I've seen.

The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Politics, and the final
version is available on SSRN:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3046797.

To summarize our article in a few lines, we show that:

1. The efficiency gap contains an implicit form of cost-benefit analysis;
when made explicit, this form appears very peculiar and is hard to justify.

2. The suggested threshold for congressional districts is scale-dependent,
making it much easier to find gerrymandering in large states than in small
states.

3. The efficiency gap ignores whether voters are extreme or moderate, and
instead identifies them only by their partisan labels. This can lead to
polarization and can harm the supporters of the weaker party.

4. The efficiency gap ignores uncertainty. (This has been noticed, to some
extent, in the literature.)

I hope that those of you following this topic find the paper interesting,
and am happy to both hear feedback and answer questions.

Best wishes,

Alan D. Miller

--

Faculty of Law and Department of Economics
University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905, Israel
admiller at econ.haifa.ac.il; http://econ.haifa.ac.il/~admiller
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20171003/ef5fed33/attachment.html>