We show theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision making and deliberation. We present a model in which committee members have career concerns and unanimity is needed to change the status quo. We study three scenarios -...

Economists usually think that rational voters have little incentives to acquire costly information. We present a theoretical model to show that, in contrast to this widely held belief, rational voters acquire considerable amounts of information if media technology is available because then they...

What is the optimal size of expert committees? To address this question, I present a model of a committee of experts with career concerns. Each expert may observe an argument about the state of the world and is unsure about the argument s soundness. Experts may remain silent or compete for the...

Cerreia-Vioglio, Ghirardato, Maccheroni, Marinacci and Siniscalchi (Economic Theory, 48:341-375, 2011) have recently axiomatised preferences in the presence of ambiguity as Monotonic Bernoullian Archimedean (MBA) preferences. We investigate the problem of Arrovian aggregation of MBA preferences...

We analyse river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be su cient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite for...

Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

This paper investigates how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects the competition intensity in a dynamic elimination contest. Theory predicts that the absolute level of investment costs has no effect on the competition intensity in homogeneous interactions. Relative cost...

Adolf Hitler's seizure of power was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Yet, our understanding of which factors fueled the astonishing rise of the Nazis remains highly incomplete. This paper shows that religion played an important role in the Nazi party's electoral...