Economists have used the term “nonbinary” to describe both choice functional nonbinariness (choice functions that cannot be rationalized as the maximizing outcome of a binary preference relation) and structural nonbinariness (the structure of the model dictates that pairs of alternatives do...

This chapter briefly reviews the present state of judgment aggregation theory and tentatively suggests a future direction for that theory. In the review, we start by emphasizing the difference between the doctrinal paradox and the discursive dilemma, two idealized examples which classically...

The German Basic Law is open for an interpretation that would allow the Constitutional Court to test the normative adequacy of most statutes. If the court does, it could be modelled as the supervisor of the legislator, i.e., of the agent of the people. The model predicts collusion between the...

In a society where individuals differ in their evaluation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having preferences that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we describe an...

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties....

Agents frequently have different opinions on where to locate a public facility. While some agents consider the facility a good and prefer to have it nearby, others dislike it and would like to see it built far away from their own locations. To aggregate agents' preferences in these situations,...

This paper examines determinants of revolutionary behaviour. We study the role of freedom of communication, repression of opposition and the government’s selfishness. Combining econometric analysis of survey data with a laboratory experiment, we analyse how these factors affect preferences for...