We consider the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, finding evidence of co-dependencies in their votes. Coincident with changes in the party imbalance of the Court over time, sharp discontinuities in these dependencies are evident. Overall, the patterns suggest a tradeoff between...

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

We develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare-reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups, and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail this reciprocal alliance behaviour. In each of the 25 rounds of our experiments, a player (the 'allocator') nominates...

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...

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities;...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest...

When groups face difficult problems, the voice of experts may be lost in the noise of others' contributions. We present results from a 'naturally noisy' setting, a large first-year undergraduate class, in which the 'expert's voice is lost' to such a degree that it is in fact optimal for all...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

Using uncertainty about the future returns to migration, the option value theory of migration can explain low migration rates in spite of huge wage differences. This paper presents the theory in a simple two-period framework and uses ethnic Germans in the CIS to find empirical support for it....