The purpose of conventions is to coordinate people's expectations in economic and social interactions that have multiple equilibria. Conventions often emerge endogenously from the accumulation of many precedents, a process that can be modeled as a stochastic dynamical system. The theory leads to...

Modern social choice theory, following Kenneth Arrow, treats voting as a method for aggregating diverse preferences and values. An earlier view, initiated by Marquis de Condorcet, is that voting is a method for aggregating information. Voters' opinions differ because they make errors of...