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Loss Aversion, Presidential Responsibility, and Midterm Congressional Elections

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TLDR
The authors explored a behavioral model of political participation, based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by Kahneman and Tversky [1979], which offers an alternative explanation for why the President's party tends to lose seats in midterm congressional elections.
Abstract
I explore a behavioral model of political participation, first introduced by Quattrone and Tversky [1988], based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by Kahneman and Tversky [1979]. The model offers an alternative explanation for why the President’s party tends to lose seats in midterm congressional elections. The model is examined empirically and compared against competing explanations for the “midterm phenomenon”.

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References
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Book ChapterDOI

Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develop an alternative model, called prospect theory, in which value is assigned to gains and losses rather than to final assets and in which probabilities are replaced by decision weights.
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Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability

TL;DR: A judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by availability, i.e., by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind, is explored.
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Toward a positive theory of consumer choice

TL;DR: The economic theory of the consumer is a combination of positive and normative theories as discussed by the authors, which describes how consumers should choose, but it is also described how they do choose, and in certain well-defined situations many consumers act in a manner that is inconsistent with economic theory.
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Status quo bias in decision making

TL;DR: A series of decision-making experiments showed that individuals disproportionately stick with the status quo as mentioned in this paper, that is, doing nothing or maintaining one's current or previous decision, and that this bias is substantial in important real decisions.
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