Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals' mechanism choices in such...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly...