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...

A group of agents wants to reform the status quo if and only if this is Pareto improving. Agents have private information and may have common or private objectives, which creates a tension between information aggregation and minority protection. We analyze a simple voting system - majority rule...

The rational-voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions (the paradox of voting and Duverger's Law) are at odds with reality. Recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an (arguably unrealistic)...

This paper reports on recurring laboratory elections in which buyers and sellers choose institutional rules to govern a subsequent trading round. The bid auction (buyers propose prices), offer auction (sellers suggest prices) and double auction (both trader types initiate price quotes) make up...

This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two...

A voting paradox arises when the outcome of a case is the opposite of the resolution of the individual issues within the case. For instance, eight Justices believe a statute is constitutional under the Due Process Clause, and five Justices believe the same statute is constitutional under the...

The jury theorem states that based on the aggregation of competences, a group of agents will be the most capable of making the right decisions rather than one individual. However, the jury theorem is based on two restrictive hypotheses, the first being the stochastic independence of decisions....

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two...

This paper presents a novel combinatorial approach for voting rule analysis. Applying reversal symmetry, we introduce a new class of preference profiles and a new representation (bracelet representation). By applying an impartial, anonymous, and neutral culture model for the case of three...