We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

Forty-two percent of Americans give different answers when asked, respectively, about the reasons for being rich and the reasons for being poor. We develop and test a theo-ry about support for redistribution in the presence of target-specific beliefs about the causes of low and high incomes. Our...

If a welfare transfers policy is programmatic (it is non-partisan, transparent and persisting), is it irrelevant for politicians' electoral fortunes? I show that the answer is no with a political agency model where politicians' competence is uncertain to all. In my set-up, an incumbent...

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents may have heterogeneous time preferences. We first show that, even if all agents share the time preference, there exists a conflict between efficiency in the sense of Pareto principle, time consistency, and equity...

Ever since Sen crystallized the logical conflict between the welfaristic value of the Pareto principle and the nonwelfaristic value of individual libertarian rights into what he christened the impossibility of a Paretian liberal , there have been many attempts in social choice theory to...

An intermediary must make a decision on behalf of a group of agents, who are privately informed about their valuations attached to decisions. Examples include the government acting as an intermediary in the provision of public goods. We show that an imperfectly informed intermediary can help...

It has long been known that when agents have von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences over lotteries, there is an incompatibility between strategy-proofness and efficiency (Gibbard, [9]; Hylland, [12]) - a solution satisfying those properties must be dictatorial. We strengthen this result by showing...