In this paper we propose minority voting as a scheme that can partially protect individuals from the risk of repeated exploitation. We consider a committee that meets twice to decide about projects where the first-period project may have a long-lasting impact. In the first period a simple open...

I discuss instances where a committee wants to deviate from the simple majority rule by adopting an alternative voting scheme for two consecutive binary ballots. The alternative voting rule, called Minority Voting as an Exception (MVE), works as follows: In the first ballot a b-majority rule is...

In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks...

We develop a model of legislative lobbying where policy proposals are endogenous. We show that a policy proposer with preferences tilted towards one lobby may be induced by an increase in that interest group's size to propose policies geared towards the opposing lobby. Hence, a larger lobby size...

We introduce the notion of verifiable information into a model of sequential debate among experts who are motivated by career concerns. We show that self-censorship may hamper the efficiency of information aggregation, as experts withhold evidence contradicting the conventional wisdom. In this...

We consider temporal aggregation of stationary and nonstationary time series with short memory, long memory and antipersistence, within the framework of fractional autoregressive processes. Asymptotically, long memory and antipersistence are preserved whereas short memory components vanish. In...

In this paper data-driven algorithms for fitting SEMIFAR models (Beran, 1999) are proposed. The algorithms combine the data-driven estimation of the nonparametric trend and maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters. For selecting the bandwidth, the proposal of Beran and Feng (1999) based...

Time series in many areas of application often display local or global trends. Typical models that provide statistical explanations of such trends are, for example, polynomial regression, smooth bounded trends that are estimated nonparametrically, and difference-stationary processes such as, for...

This paper puts focus on the hazard function of inter-trade durations to characterize the intraday trading process. It sheds light on the time varying trade intensity and, thus, on the liquidity of an asset and the informations channels which propagate price signals among asymmetrically informed...