We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to vote to adopt one of two alternatives or continue to collect more information. The process stops when a qualified majority vote for an alternative. Three main...

Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...

We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups in a dynamic setting. Even when group members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions. When deadlines are far away, uninformed group members freeride on each others' efforts to...

A team must select among competing projects that differ in their payoff consequences for its members. Each agent chooses a project and exerts costly effort affecting its random completion time. When one or more projects are complete, agents bargain over which one to implement. A consensus...

In a Hotelling duopoly model, we introduce quality that is more appreciated by closer consumers. Then higher common quality raises equilibrium prices, in contrast to the standard neutrality result. Furthermore, we allow consumers to buy one out of two goods (single-purchase) or both...

We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a...

We introduce endogenous political parties into the Hotelling-Downs voting framework to model the selection of candidates. First, activists choose which party to join, if at all. Second, party members select a champion for the general election. Third, the electorate median voter determines the...

When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain...

In sport tournaments, the rules are presumably structured in a way that any team cannot be better off (e.g., to advance to the next round of competition) by losing instead of winning a game. Starting with a real-world example, we demonstrate that the existing national rules of awarding places...

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...