We study a voting model with partial information in which the evaluation of social welfare must be based on information about agents' top choices plus qualitative background conditions on preferences. The former is elicited individually, while the latter is not. The social evaluator is modeled...

We critically discuss the Jefferson/D'Hondt and Webster/Sainte-Laguë methods, which are used to allocate parliament seats to parties in the mixed-member proportional representation systems in Germany, New Zealand, Bolivia, South Africa, South Korea, Scotland and Wales, as well as in the...

Five German leading parties and their coalitions are evaluated from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the positions of the parties on over 30 topical issues are compared with the results of polls of public opinion. The outcomes are summarized in the indices of popularity and...

We consider the problem of how societies should be partitioned into classes if individuals express their views about who should be put with whom in the same class. A non-bossy social aggregator depends only on those cells of the individual partitions the society members classify themselves in....

The outcomes of the 2013 German Bundestag (federal parliament) election are analyzed from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the party positions on 36 topical issues are compared with the results of public opinion polls, and the party and coalition indices of popularity (the...

We conduct an experiment to uncover the reasons behind the typically large behavioral variation and low explanatory power of Nash equilibrium observed in Tullock contests. In our standard contest treatment, only 7% of choices are consistent with Nash equilibrium which is in line with the...

We introduce a binding unanimous voting rule to a public goods game with an uncertain threshold for the total group contribution. In a laboratory experiment we find that voting generates significantly higher total contributions than making individual voluntary contributions to the public good....

In a laboratory experiment, we investigate if groups consisting of two heterogeneous player types (with different marginal contribution costs) can increase their total contributions and payoffs in a threshold public goods game if transfer payments are possible among the players. We find that...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even with agents heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point of time there may exist a "median voter" whose...

The German two-vote election system implements two historical conceptions of political representation coined at the end of the 18th century during the American and French Revolutions. The descriptive conception - the parliament portrays the society in miniature - is implemented in the first vote...