This paper studies the internal organizational design of politicalinstitutions in presence of lobbying. We consider a legislature ascomposed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. Thefloor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented.The policy outcome is ex...

This paper proposes a new formulation of the Borda rule in order to deal with the problem of cloning manipulation. This new Borda voting specification will be named: Dynamic Borda Voting (DBV) and it satisfies Arrow's IIA condition. The calculations, propositions with proof and explanations are...

In this paper I develop a simple dynamic agency model postulating that, among budgetary institutions, transparency of the budgeting process is the main driving force in explaining differences in fiscal outcomes and that budgetary numeric rules can be an active long-run constraint only if the...

This paper studies allocation correspondences in the house allocation problems with collective initial endowments. We examine the implications of two axioms, namely “consistency” and “unanimity.” Consistency requires the allocation correspondence be invariant under reductions of...

This paper develops an expanded framework for social planning in which the existence of coercion is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion for individuals and in the aggregate, its difference from redistribution, and its incorporation into normative...

Tuning one's shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical...

This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani (2009a) to infinitely-lived societies. First, a novel characterisation of the inegalitarian leximax social welfare relation is provided based on the Individual Benefit Principle,...

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...

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....

This paper provides evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of "tax morale". We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that "nice guys finish last": groups with higher tax morale will...