A competitive rent-seeking club (CRSC) offers its members the chance of winning a prize (status, position, privilege) by being selected, typically, by a civil servant or a politician. The selector replaces in our setting the usual contest success function; instead of determining the winner on...

Many voting rules and, in particular, the plurality rule and Condorcet-consistent voting rules satisfy the simple-majority decisiveness property. The problem implied by such decisiveness, namely, the universal disregard of the preferences of the minority, can be ameliorated by applying unbiased...

The difficulty of optimal decision making in uncertain dichotomous choice settings is that it requires information on the expertise of the decision makers (voters). This paper presents a method of optimally weighting voters even without testing them against questions with known right answers....

Collective contests are examined permitting heterogeneity of stakes within every competing group. Our first concern is whether unequal distribution of stakes in a group can enhance its win probability. Our second concern is whether a large stake in a group can be individually disadvantageous. We...

We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...

In certain judgmental situations where a "correct" decision is presumed to exist, optimal decision making requires evaluation of the decision-maker's capabilities and the selection of the appropriate aggregation rule. The major and so far unresolved difficulty is the former necessity. This paper...