Majority voting is considered an efficient information aggregation mechanism in committee decision-making. We examine if this holds in environments where voters first need to acquire information from sources of varied quality and cost. In such environments, efficiency may depend on free-riding...

We model an election between two Downsian mainstream candidates and a third inflexible politician. There is uncertainty about the state of the world. Candidates receive signals on the state and propose a policy to implement. There are two classes of voters: ideological, who are biased towards...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...

We experimentally study the impact of adding an explicit nil vote option to the ballot in both compulsory and voluntary voting settings. We investigate this issue in an informational voting setting, in which some voters are uninformed and face the swing voter’s curse, implying that they can...

We study information aggregation with a biased election organizer who recruits voters at some cost. Voters are symmetric ex-ante and prefer policy a in state a and policy b in state B, but the organizer prefers policy a regardless of the state. Each recruited voter observes a private signal...

I investigate the welfare properties of a broad class of electoral systems with endogenous turnout. I find that the welfare ranking of electoral systems depends on the composition of the electorate. If citizens have identical voting costs, then all electoral systems that satisfy certain...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...

In this paper we propose an electoral model that studies the interaction between the distribution of voters ideal policies and the success of dynastic politicians. Electoral success of politicians depends on their ability to implement better policies for the voters because campaign promises are...