Character and Candidates: A View from Decision Theory ∗ Shachar Kariv † UC Berkeley William Zame ‡ UCLA October 25, 2014 Abstract Campaigns for political office often center on the “character” of the candidates. Moral issues aside, there is one aspect of a candidate’s character that voters clearly should care about: attitude toward risk. If there is a linkage between the candidate’s attitudes toward risk in the private domain and in the public domain then (this aspect of) the candidate’s character provides important information about (future) policy- making decisions. This paper formalizes this issue and identifies such linkage. The strength of the link depends on the amount the voter observes/infers and on the de- gree of rationality the voter ascribes to the candidate. (JEL Classification Numbers: D72, D81.) ∗ The results reported here were previously distributed in a paper titled “Choosing a President: Does Character Matter?" We thank Chris Chambers for pointing out an error in our thinking and Robert Powell for detailed comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan, Edi Karni, Jennet Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Polak, Gerald Pomper, Daniel Silverman, and Daniel Tichenor and a number of seminar audiences for encouragement and helpful conversations. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation under grants SES-0962543 (Kariv) and SES-0617027 (Zame), and by the UC Berkeley and UCLA Academic Senate Committees on Research, and hospitality was provided by the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya (Kariv) and Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (Zame). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency. † Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 530 Evans Hall #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720 (E-mail: kariv@berkeley.edu, URL: http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~kariv/). ‡ Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, Bunche Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (E-mail: zame@econ.ucla.edu, URL: www.econ.ucla.edu/zame/). 1