Voters have strong incentives to increase their influence by trading votes, a practice indeed believed to be common. But is vote trading welfare-improving or welfare-decreasing? We review the theoretical literature and, when available, its related experimental tests. We begin with the analysis...

Liquid Democracy is a voting system touted as the golden medium between representative and direct democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters can delegate their votes as they wish. The outcome can be superior to simple majority voting, but even when experts are correctly identified,...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: A core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...