Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide toacquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decisionproblem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its qualityhas been acquired or not, we compare the...

Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

Democracies delegate substantial decision power to politicians. Using a model in which an incumbent can design, examine and implement public policies, we show that examination takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, elections. Elections are needed as a carrot and a stick to motivate...