After decades of government growth, Western countries have witnessed major policy reversals. Prominent examples include the far-reaching policy reversals implemented by Thatcher, Reagan, and Douglas. This paper offers an explanation for these policy reversals. Our key argument rests on the...

A cooperative game with transferable utilities, or simply aTU-game, describes a situation in which players can obtain certainpayoffs by cooperation. A solution mapping for these games is amapping which assigns to every game a set of payoff distributionsover the players in the game. Well-known...

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide toacquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decisionproblem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its qualityhas been acquired or not, we compare the...

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

This paper deals with the optimal provision of infrastructure by means of public-private partnership contracts. Inthe economic literature infrastructure is characterized as a large, indivisible and non-rival capital good thatproduces services for its users. The non-rivalness or nonexcludability...

The paper discusses the set of Harsanyi payoff vectors,also known as the Selectope. First, we reconsider some results on Harsanyi payoff vectors, published by Vasil'ev in the late 1970's, within a more general framework. In particular, these results state already that the set of Harsanyi payoff...

This paper studies the selection of information collecting agents by policy makers in the light of two agency problems. First, it is often hard to ascertain how much effort agents have put in acquiring information. Second, when agents have an interest in the policy outcome, they may manipulate...

This paper is concerned with the role of committees in collective decision-makingprocesses in a world where agents must be motivated to collect information. Committees improvethe quality of decision-making by providing information and by coordinating the collection ofinformation. We address two...

Democracies delegate substantial decision power to politicians. Using a model in which an incumbent can design, examine and implement public policies, we show that examination takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, elections. Elections are needed as a carrot and a stick to motivate...