Strategic candidacy with reluctance

Abstract In strategic candidacy games, both voters and candidates have preferences regarding the election results, and candidates strategically decide whether to participate or abstain, in order to sway the outcome in their preferred direction. Often, it is assumed that candidates are keen to be elected or even just show up for visibility purposes, unless their presence is harmful. However, there may be candidates who find it costly to run an electoral campaign in the first place and therefore prefer to withdraw if their participation has no effect on the election outcome (a.k.a. lazy candidates), or those who would rather not win the election due to perceived interpersonal or reputational risks, unless they see no better alternative (a.k.a. reluctant leaders). In this work, we open the study of reluctance in strategic candidacy, and extend the standard candidacy game model to incorporate the concepts of reluctant participation (lazy candidacy) and reluctant leadership. We examine the pure-strategy Nash equilibria and the outcomes of natural iterative dynamic processes in such games, both from a normative and from a computational perspective, and compare them with their counterparts in the conventional model.