Do informed electorates choose better candidates? While that question is straightforward, its answer often is elusive. Typically, candidate-quality information is neither salient nor subject to exogenous change. We identify a natural experiment within a non-political election setting that is transparent and features exogenous change in the candidate-quality information frontier. The setting is Major League Baseball’s (MLB) annual selection of two most valuable players, a challenging environment with an innately heterogeneous candidate set, and the exogenous change is the development of the pathbreaking, comprehensive player-value measure Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in 2004 and its subsequent calculation for all retrospective MLB player-seasons. WAR's development and rapid popularization informed voting from 2004 onward. Retrospective calculation allows us to draw back the curtain and evaluate how pre-2004 voters behaved with respect to revealed candidate quality. From negative binomial, fixed-effect regression models, we find robust evidence of significant, substantial, pivotal behavioral change on the part of voters since 2004.

知情的选民会选择更好的候选人吗？尽管该问题很简单，但其答案通常难以捉摸。通常，候选质量信息既不显着也不易受到外在变化的影响。我们确定了一个非政治选举环境中的自然实验，该实验是透明的，并具有候选人质量信息边界的外生变化。该设置是美国职棒大联盟（MLB）年度评选的两个最有价值的球员，有天生异类候选集合中具有挑战性的环境，而外生变化是开创性的，全面的球员价值计量的发展胜高于更替（WAR）在2004年及其以后所有追溯的计算美国职业棒球大联盟球员赛季。从2004年开始，WAR的发展和迅速普及推动了投票。通过回顾性计算，我们可以拉开帷幕，并评估2004年前的选民在所披露候选人质量方面的表现。从负二项式，固定效应回归模型中，我们发现自2004年以来选民的重大，重大，关键性行为变化的有力证据。