This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...

The paper analyzes a communication game between a decision-maker and a reputationally concerned expert drawn from a population of informed and uninformed experts. It departs from the literature [e.g. (Ottaviani and Sorensen(2006), Scharfstein and Stein (1990)] by considering the possibility that...

The selection of political representatives depends on the political system. Principals, such as voters or districts, may benefit by strategically electing representatives different from themselves. While a status-quo biased delegate may be a better negotiator, an enthusiastic representative has...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts must decide whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of "society." Each expert's private signal is a noisy version of what the "state of the art science" would...

This chapter surveys voting game experiments that involve incomplete information with regard to voters’ opinions about what the best course of action might be and characteristics, especially their private costs and benefits related to decision making and their group affiliations (i.e., which...

This paper develops the symmetric power order, a measure of voting power for multicandidate elections. The measure generalizes standard pivotality-based voting power measures for binary elections, such as Banzhaf power. At the same time, the measure is not based on pivotality, but rather on a...

This paper studies coalitional strategy-proofness of social choice correspondences that map preference profiles into sets of alternatives. In particular, we focus on the Pareto rule, which associates the set of Pareto optimal alternatives with each preference profile, and examine whether or not...

Early results on the emptiness of the core and the majority-rule-chaos results led to the recognition of the importance of modeling institutional details in political processes. A sample of the literature on game-theoretic models of political phenomena that ensued is presented. In the case of...

The burgeoning literature on the use of sanctions to support public goods provision has largely neglected the use of formal or centralized sanctions. We let subjects playing a linear public goods game vote on the parameters of a formal sanction scheme capable both of resolving and of...