Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

There are many situations where different groups make collective decisions by voting in an assembly or committee in which each group is represented by a single person. There is a great deal of theoretical, normative literature on the question of what voting system such an assembly should use,...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...

A set of jobs need to be served by a server which can serve only one job at a time. Jobs have processing times and incur waiting costs (linear in their waiting time). The jobs share their costs through compensation using monetary transfers. In the first part, we provide an axiomatic...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights, or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power...

We consider a committee that consists of n members with one person one vote approving a proposal if the number of affirmative votes from the members reaches threshold k. Which threshold k between 1 and n is "good" for the committee? We suppose that if a new threshold k' proposed by some...

We study international free-riding-proof coalitions to solve trans-boundary environmental problems such as global warming. We show that the free-riding problem is rather serious so that a free-riding-proof coalition can consist of only a small number of countries. In the optimal coalitional...

In this paper we address several issues related to collective dichotomous decision-making by means of quaternary voting rules, i.e., when voters may choose between four actions: voting yes, voting no, abstaining and not turning up-which are aggregated by a voting rule into a dichotomous...

It is known that on some social choice and economic domains, a social choice function is coalition strategy-proof if and only if it is Maskin monotonic (e.g. Muller and Satterthwaite, 1977). This paper studies the foundation of those results. I provide a set of conditions which is sufficient for...

This paper examines how neutral the current EU decision-making procedures are to membership and how well they obey certain transparent general constitutional principles. The paper evaluates the performance of the procedures by strategic and classical power indices. The main emphasis in the...