A group of agents has to decide whether to accept or reject a proposal. Agents vote in favor or against the proposal and, if the number of agents in favor is greater to certain quota, the proposal is accepted. The \textit{socially optimal decision} is the one adopted when all agents vote...

A high court has to decide whether a law is constitutional, un- constitutional, or interpretable. The voting system is runoff. Runoff voting systems can be interpreted both, as social choice functions or as mechanisms. It is known that, for universal domains of preferences, runoff voting systems...

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no...

We provide a general coalitional procedure that characterizes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems inspired by the Talmud.

In a recent paper, Thomson and Yeh [Operators for the adjudication of conflicting claims, Journal of Economic Theory 143 (2008) 177-198] introduced the concept of operators on the space of rules for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. They focussed on three operators in order to...

We model an election between two downsian candidates and a third deterministic one. There is uncertainty about the state of the world. Candidates receive signals on the state and propose a policy to implement. There are two types of voters: social concerned and biased. For both the cases in...

This paper proposes a theory of media silence. The argument is that news organizations have the power to raise public concern and so affect the probability that there is ex-post verification of the true state of the world. Built on the literature of career concerns, we consider a newspaper that...

Parliamentary elections to the Basque Autonomous Community have a stable multi-party system that regularly produces long-lived minority and coalition governments. More amazing still, this stable party system arises in the context of a complex social and political setting in which the society...

We present a framework to analyze the relative importance of issues for the electorate. We distinguish two concepts -- issue salience and issue divisiveness -- and present those in the context of the multidimensional spatial model. Issue salience, which is widely studied in empirical and...

The top-two primary is the new primary system passed in several states of the US that creates a single ballot in which the top two vote getters pass to the general election. Primary elections induce a sequential game with three stages: the candidate-entry stage, the primary election stage, and...