Some committees are made up of experts, persons who care both about the matter at hand and about coming across as able decision makers. We show that such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. That is, once the decision has been reached, they show a united front to the...

This paper describes and analyzes the results of a unique field experiment especially designed to test the effects of the level of commitment and information available to individuals when sharing risk. We find that limiting exogenously provided commitment is associated with less risk sharing,...

We show that simple majority rule satisfies five standard and attractive axioms-the Pareto property, anonymity, neutrality, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and (generic) decisiveness-over a larger class of preference domains than (essentially) any other voting rule. Hence, in this...