In this paper I analyze the effect of the transparency of the decision making process in committees on the decisions that are eventually taken. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns, so that each member tries to enhance his own reputation. When the decision making...

When considering engaging in conflict to secure control of a resource, a group needs to predict the amount of post-conflict leakage due to infiltration by members of losing groups. We use this insight to explain why conflict often takes place along ethnic lines, why some ethnic groups are more...

We are concerned with the design of a constitution for a firm - an ex ante contract which assigns residual rights of control (and possibly residual income rights) without reference to the issue to be decided. We focus attention on two polar constitutions: non-profit cooperatives and outside...

In this paper I analyze the effect of the transparency of the decision making process in committees on the decisions that are eventually taken. I focus on committees whose members are motivated by career concerns, so that each member tries to enhance his own reputation. When the decision making...

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formal work on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline...

If a group is modelled as a single Bayesian agent, what should its beliefs be? I propose an axiomatic model that connects group beliefs to beliefs of the group members. The group members may have different information, different prior beliefs and even different domains (algebras) within which...

I examine decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics that it unleashes. The national effects of decentralization are simply the sum of its local-level effects. Hence to understand decentralization we must first understand how local government works. This paper proposes a theory of...

In the framework of judgment aggregation, we assume that some formulas of the agenda are singled out as premisses, and that both Independence (formula-wise aggregation) and Unanimity Preservation hold for them. Whether premiss-based aggregation thus defined is compatible with conclusion-based...

There is a lot of evidence that identity matters for behavior. There is a widespread belief that societies will function better if they manage to establish a common sense of identity among the population. And there are also contemporary fears that this common identity is threatened in several...

In response to recent work on the aggregation of individual judgments on logically connected propositions into collective judgments, it is often asked whether judgment aggregation is a special case of Arrowian preference aggregation. We argue the op- posite. After proving a general impossibility...