What is the optimal size of expert committees? To address this question, I present a model of a committee of experts with career concerns. Each expert may observe an argument about the state of the world and is unsure about the argument s soundness. Experts may remain silent or compete for the...

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number k of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We provide a characterization of...

In this short paper we provide two versions of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, in a world with only one preference profile. Both versions are extremely simple and allow a transparent understanding of Arrow’s theorem. The first version assumes a two-agent society; the second version, which is...

In this paper we provide a simple new version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, in a world with only one preference profile. This theorem relies on a new assumption of preference diversity, and we explore alternative notions of preference diversity at length.

This paper studies the assignment of decision makers to two committees that make decisions by a simple majority rule. There is an even number of decision makers at each of various skill levels and each committee has an odd number of members. Surprisingly, even with the symmetric assumptions in...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest...

The characteristics of endogenously determined sharing rules and the group-size paradox are studied in a model of group contest with the following features: (i) The prize has mixed privatepublic good characteristics. (ii) Groups can differ in marginal cost of effort and their membership size....

A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests and the government can influence their outcome by choosing their type. We consider a contest with two interest groups: one that is governed by a central planner and one that is not. Rent dissipation is compared under two well-known contest...