We consider a simple variant of the canonical model of social learning and show that in many situations it is optimal for an agent to abandon her own information and follow the minority rather than the majority. This possibility depends on two economically meaningful requirements: agents are...

We present a model where heterogeneous districts choose both whether to experiment and the policies to experiment with. Since districts learn from each other, the first-best requires that policy experiments converge so that innovations are useful also for neighbors. However, the equilibrium...

In recent decades psychologists have shown that the standard model of individual choice is often violated as choices are influenced by the decision context. We propose that voting behavior may be similarly influenced and we introduce a theory of <italic>context-dependent voting</italic>. Context-dependence...

The role of expertise in policy making has been a focus of political science research in recent decades. Underlying formal models in this area is a conception of expertise that is very simple: expertise is a single piece of information. Combined with a condition on the set of possible processes,...

In this paper I show that an equilibrium exists to the sequential voting game in which a bandwagon begins with probability 1. These bandwagons are driven by a combination of beliefs and the desire of voters to vote for the winning candidate. Significantly, in this equilibrium the pivot...

In recent decades psychologists have shown that the standard model of individual choice is often violated. One regularly observed violation is that choices are influenced by the decision context. To incorporate these effects into politics, we introduce a theory of context-dependent voting and...

I study a dynamic model of trial-and-error search in which agents do not have complete knowledge of how choices are mapped into outcomes. Agents learn about the mapping by observing the choices of earlier agents and the outcomes that are realized. The key novelty is that the mapping is...

Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? To shed light on this important question, I develop a simple model of two candidate electoral competitions in which candidates may be either office or policy motivated. In a second departure from standard formulations, the...