This paper investigates how social interactions impact the decision to participate in one’s local environment. Existing work often reports correlations between social interactions and local participation, but it is unclear what the causal direction of this relationship is. A key contribution...

Power is a core concept in the analysis and design of organisations. In this paper we consider positional power in hierarchies. One of the problems with the extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is that it is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the bare...

Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability-the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else-is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that, by coordinating voting behavior,these interest groups increase the winning set, which is defined as the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the...

We investigate the implications of imposing balanced consistency and balanced cost reduction in the context of sequencing problems. Balanced consistency requires that the effect on the payoff from the departure of one agent to another agent should be equal between any two agents. On the other...

We develop a theoretical framework for studying the effects of interaction on the quaJity of decision-making by monetary policy committees. We show that interaction, i.e. increasing one's expertise through an exchange of views, is most likely not to result in interdependent voting...

Most monetary policy committees decide on interest rates using a simple majority voting rule. Given the inherent heterogeneity of committee members, this voting rule is suboptimal in terms of the quality of the interest rate decision, but popular for other (political) reasons. We show that a...

Interest groups are introduced in a spatial model of electoral competition between two political parties. We show that the presence of these interest groups increases the winning set, which is the set of policy platforms for the challenger that will defeat the incumbent. Therefore interest...