This Paper studies some of the many options facing EU leaders when choosing a viable voting system for the EU25+. It provides quantitative estimates of the efficiency and power distributions of the various EU voting schemes that are being considered. It also provides intuition on how various...

Probabilistic measures of a priori voting power are useful tools to asses actors' influence on collective decision-making either for the purpose of designing a voting organ or to model particular policy cases. This paper makes an attempt to reduce a dynamic voting process into a cooperative...

Individuals in a committee or election can increase their voting power by forming coalitions. This behavior is shown here to yield a prisoner's dilemma, in which a subset of voters can increase their power, while reducing average voting power for the electorate as a whole. This is an unusual...

The EU declares to provide support for the rural and poor regions of its member states. However, recent research shows that past EU budget allocations (in EU-15) can largely be explained by measures of the distribution of voting power in the Council of Ministers deciding on the bulk of EU...

This paper evaluates the determination of receipts from EU budget by considering a richer institutional structure than in earlier studies. We assume that the member states have self-interested objectives in CM trying to minimize their contributions within the given framework of the EU budget...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in a common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...

I develop a model of group decision-making, in which a committee generates proposals and holds open discussions, but the ultimate decision is either taken by a leader (decision by authority) or by majority vote. Optimal communication processes are studied that combine both cheap talk statements...

Treaty organizations, like other clubs, attempt to solve problems that can more effectively be addressed collectively than independently. In order to address these problems, a club's leadership may be granted coercive power of various kinds. In ordinary clubs, coercive power is simply the right...