We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a proposed innovation on behalf of 'society'. Each expert's signal about the innovation's quality is generated by the available evidence and the best practices of the experts'...

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

Klassischerweise üben Vertreter der Wirtschaft sich jenseits der unmittelbaren Betroffenheit weitgehend parteipolitischer Enthaltsamkeit. Da sich in der Bundesrepublik mit der Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) eine von ihrer wirtschaftspolitischen Programmatik her liberal-rechtspopulistische...

Ostdeutschen AfD-Landesverbände sind radikaler aufgestellt als ihre westdeutschen Pendants und ihre politische Durchschlagskraft könnte sich bei den Landtagswahlen in Sachsen, Thüringen und Brandenburg im September noch vergrößern. Trotz der mittlerweile vielfachen Warnungen vor nicht...

Behavioral implementation studies implementation when agents' choices need not be rational. All existing papers of this literature, however, fail to handle a large class of choice behaviors because they rely on a well-known condition called Unanimity. This condition says, roughly speaking, that...

We study rotation programs within the standard implementation framework under complete information. A rotation program is a myopic stable set whose states are arranged circularly, and agents can effectively move only between two consecutive states. We provide characterizing conditions for the...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision rules...

The Borda Count (BC) is a positional voting procedure fairly often applied in nonpolitical choice settings. It has a usual mixture of good and bad theoretical properties. It is monotonic and consistent and excludes the election of an eventual Condorcet loser. It, however, does not necessarily...

This paper deals with the voting rules in the EU Council. Both internal and external impact of the voting rules are evaluated. Internal impact affects the distribution of power among the member states and external impact affects power relations between the main decision-making bodies in the EU....

Numerous simple proofs of the celebrated Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem (Gibbard, 1977, Satterthwaite, 1975) has been given in the literature. These are based on a number of different intuitions about the most fundamental reason for the result. In this paper we derive the Gibbard-Satterthwaite...