Consider a public project which produces a consumption good and which benefits future generations. Let a conventional cost-benefit analysis find that it gives higher benefits than projects it would dis-place in the private sector. Voters may nevertheless oppose the public project: the...

Consider a public project which produces a consumption good and which benefits future generations. Let a conventional cost-benefit analysis find that it gives higher benefits than projects it would displace in the private sector. Voters may nevertheless oppose the public project: the combination...

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the...

Decision-making processes are studied using non-standard all-pay structures. Our interest is motivated by regulatory, political, legal, military, and economic applications in which individual actions determine the consequences for a larger group or the general public. The common features of...

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....

This chapter surveys the literature on strategy proofness from a historical perspective. While I discuss the connections with other works on incentives in mechanism design, the main emphasis is on social choice models.

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the...

In a Bayesian model of group decision-making, dependence among the agents' types has been shown to have a beneficial effect on the design of incentive compatible mechanisms that achieve the efficient choice associated with complete information. This effect is shown here to depend as much upon...