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...

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...

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...

What are the effects of institutional subversion on small business development, fiscal policies, economic growth, and firm performance? This Paper provides an empirical investigation of institutional subversion in Russia’s regions. We develop a complete account of preferential treatments to...

This short paper analyses the tension between "widening" and "deepening" of organizations such as the European Union. Members have the same consumption benefit of reform but weak and strong members differ in their cost of exerting reform efforts. As decisions are taken by unanimity, the reform...

The decision-making rules of the European Union (EU) are defined in an incomplete contract signed by 15 national governments. The design of the contract defines the set of policy issues where it applies – in decision-making rules i.e. the majority rules and the division of powers among the...

This paper reports the first laboratory study of the swing voter’s curse and provides insights on the larger theoretical and empirical literature on 'pivotal voter' models. Our experiment controls for different information levels of voters, as well as the size of the electorate, the...

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...