Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

Many voting rules and, in particular, the plurality rule and Condorcet-consistent voting rules satisfy the simple-majority decisiveness property. The problem implied by such decisiveness, namely, the universal disregard of the preferences of the minority, can be ameliorated by applying unbiased...

The characteristics of endogenously determined sharing rules and the group-size paradox are studied in a model of group contest with the following features: (i) The prize has mixed privatepublic good characteristics. (ii) Groups can differ in marginal cost of effort and their membership size....

In certain judgmental situations where a "correct" decision is presumed to exist, optimal decision making requires evaluation of the decision-maker's capabilities and the selection of the appropriate aggregation rule. The major and so far unresolved difficulty is the former necessity. This paper...

The classic fair cake-cutting problem [Steinhaus, 1948] is extended by introducing geometric constraints on the allocated pieces. Specifically, agents may demand to get their share as a square or a rectangle with a bounded length/width ratio. This is a plausible constraint in realistic...

The form of contests for a single fixed prize can be determined by a designer who maximizes the contestants' efforts. This paper establishes that, under common knowledge of the two asymmetric contestants' prize valuations, a fair Tullock-type endogenously determined lottery is always superior to...

This paper focuses on indivisible multiple-cost–single-benefit projects that must be approved by the government. A simple mechanism is proposed that ensures an efficient and fair implementation of such projects. The proposed mechanism is appropriate for a unilateral information structure: the...

Committee decision making is examined in this study focusing on the role assigned to the committee members. In particular, we are concerned about the comparison between committee performance under specialization and non-specialization of the decision makers. -- project selection ; public policy...

In this study we propose an axiomatic theory of decision-making under risk that is based on a new approach to the modeling of framing that focuses on the subjective statistical dependence between prizes of compared lotteries. Unlike existing models that allow objective statistical dependence, as...