This essay provides a formal justification for qualified majority rules. Specifically, within an uncertain dichotomous choice framework, in which individual preferences are identical but actual judgments may differ, special majority rules emerge as decision rules that maximize the probability of...

This essay measures and analyzes for a special class of point-voting schemes (the Borda method, plurality rule and the unrestricted point-voting scheme) sensitivity to preference variation (a simple change in the socially winning alternative resulting from alteration of a single voter's...

This paper focuses on two properties of points voting schemes: their vulnerability to preference misrepresentation and their potential for preference expression. In the spirit of the seminal work of Buchanan and Tullock [2], this dual criterion might be used for the choice of an optimal points...

The proposal of an inefficient policy usually stimulates a political struggle between the affected interest groups. The resulting wasteful lobbying activities may reduce welfare, even if the proposed policy is not approved. In this paper we show that sufficient asymmetry in payoffs not only...

The primary objective of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent-seeking setting on the possible nonexistence of Nash equilibrium. Focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to...