A committee of experts votes between a multi-attribute alternative and status quo. Each expert is a biased specialist who can privately evaluate only one attribute and puts more weight on it. We study whether a social-minded principal would compose the committee of more or less biased experts....

We examine the consequences of vote transparency in committees whose members fear being blamed by partisan observers for casting an unfavorable vote. We show that such social pressure, like optimal taxation, can improve the collective decision by mitigating a voting externality. Hence,...

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not - as is often suggested - imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the...