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....

The dissertation has two aims. First, to explain why normative theories of politics, economics, and group decisions depend on ethics. Second, to refute the view that they need not. This latter view has recently been defended by Rawls, Hampshire, Williams, and Habermas. The view that all such...

This essay explores the legacy of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock as it pertains to the establishment of public choice as a field of scholarly inquiry. The Calculus of Consent is surely the Ur-text for capturing that legacy, yet that legacy can be discerned in two distinct directions. One...

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

In a large economy, a first-best provison rule for a public good is robustly implementable with budget balance because no one individual alone can affect the aggregate outcome. First-best outcomes can, however, be blocked by coalitions of agents acting in concert. With a requirement of immunity...

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

This paper studies the nature of social welfare orders on infinite utility streams, satisfying the efficiency principle known as Monotonicity and the consequentialist equity principle known as Strong Equity. It provides a complete characterization of domain sets for which there exists such a...

This paper studies the nature of social welfare orders on infinite utility streams, satisfying the consequentialist equity principles known as Hammond Equity and Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. The first result shows that every social welfare order satisfying Hammond Equity and the Strong...

The existence of a Paretian and finitely anonymous ordering in the set of infinite utility streams implies the existence of a non-Ramsey set (a nonconstructive object whose existence requires the axiom of choice). Therefore, each Paretian and finitely anonymous quasi-ordering either is...

An anonymous social choice function for a large atomless population maps cross-section distributions of preferences into outcomes. Because any one individual is too insignificant to affect these distributions, every anonymous social choice function is individually strategy- proof. However, not...