Much economic analysis derives policy recommendations based on social welfare criteria intended to model the preferences of a policy maker. Yet, little is known about policy maker's normative views in a way amenable to this use. In a behavioral experiment, we elicit German legislators' social...

We study a classic mechanism design problem: How to organize trade between two privately informed parties. We characterize an optimal mechanism under selfish preferences and present experimental evidence that, under such a mechanism, a non-negligible fraction of individuals deviates from the...

Marengo and the second author have developed in the last years a geometric model of social choice when this takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, showing that by bundling and unbundling the same set of constituent elements an authority has the power of determining the social...

We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of...

Behavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous; suggesting that group composition may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. This parallels research in public economics where...

We present a geometric model of social choice when the latter takes place among bundles of interdependent elements, that we will call objects. We show that the outcome of the social choice process is highly dependent on the way these bundles are formed. By bundling and unbundling the same set of...

People's desire for fair transactions can play an important role in negotiations, organizations, and markets. In this paper, we show that markets can also shape what people consider to be a fair transaction. We propose a simple and generally-applicable model of path-dependent fairness...

In this paper we develop on a geometric model of social choice among bundles of interdependent elements (objects). Social choice can be seen as a process of search for optima in a complex multi-dimensional space and objects determine a decomposition of such a space into subspaces. We present a...

Recently, Marengo and Settepanella (2010) introduced a model of social choice among bundles of interdependent elements. In this paper we prove that their voting model is highly decidable, i.e. a group of agents that agrees to use such voting process has an high probability to reach a final...

We study a classic mechanism design problem: How to organize trade between two privately informed parties. We characterize an optimal mechanism under selfish preferences and present experimental evidence that, under such a mechanism, a non-negligible fraction of individuals deviates from the...