Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals’ mechanism choices in...

Bouton et al. (2022) compare the properties of majority run-off and plurality rule elections in a laboratory setting, focusing on Duverger's prediction that plurality rule leads to higher levels of strategic voting. They produce a causal estimate of the difference in incidence of strategic...

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody's lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

We analyse and empirically examine a multi-level common-pool resource (CPR) game consisting of a collective-choice level game and an operational-level game. In the collective-choice game, participants anonymously propose allocation rules to be used in the operational game and vote anonymously on...

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody’s lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized...

We perform an experimental test of a modification of the controversial canonical mechanism for Nash implementation, using 3 subjects in non-repeated groups, as well as 3 outcomes, states of nature, and integer choices. We find that this mechanism successfully implements the desired outcome a...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

Which decision rule should we use to make a binary collective choice? While voting procedures are applied ubiquitously, they are criticized for being inefficient. Using monetary transfers, efficient choices can be made at the cost of a budget imbalance. Is it optimal to do so? And why are...

We develop a model that combines competitive exchange of private commodities across endogenously formed groups with public good provision and global collective decisions. There is a tension between local and global collective decisions. In particular, we show that group formation and collective...