In a jury decision-making, individuals must compromise in order to reach a group consensus. If individuals compromise for non-rational reasons, such as a preference for conformity or due to erroneous information, then the final decision of the group may be biased. This paper presents original...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may dier in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...

We compare experimentally the revealed distributional preferences of individuals and teams in allocation tasks. We find that teams are significantly more benevolent than individuals in the domain of disadvantageous inequality while the benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality is...

Experimental analyses have identified significant tendencies for individuals to follow herd decisions, a finding which has been explained using Bayesian principles of statistical inference. This paper outlines the results from a herding task designed to extend these analyses. Empirically, we...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries-Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

Tax incentives can be more or less salient, i.e. noticeable or cognitively easy to process. Our hypothesis is that taxes on consumers are more salient to consumers than equivalent taxes on sellers because consumers underestimate the extent of tax shifting in the market. We show that tax salience...

A review is given of the use of laboratory experiments in the Public Choice literature. A distinction is made in experiments on public goods, participation games, rent-seeking and lobbying, and spatial voting.