Consider a voting procedure where countries, states, or districts comprising a union each elect representatives who then participate in later votes at the union level on their behalf. The countries, provinces, and states may vary in their populations and composition. If we wish to maximize the...

We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by...

Electoral legislation varies across countries and within countries over time, and across different types of elections in terms of how it allows publication of intermediate election results including turnout and candidates' vote shares during an election day. Using a pivotal costly voting model...

Some committees convene behind closed doors while others publicly discuss issues and make their decisions. This paper studies the role of open and closed committee decision making in presence of external influence. We show that restricting the information of interest groups may reduce the bias...

We analyse committees of voters who take a decision between two options as a two- stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non-verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best option. In a voting stage, votes are cast and one of the options is implemented. We...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the probability of casting a decisive vote for a class or random electorate models encompassing the celebrated IC and IAC models. The emphasis is on the impact of correlation across votes on the order of magnitude of this event. Our proof techniques...

In this paper, we clarify the relationship between influence/power measurement and utility measurement, the most popular two social objective criteria used when evaluating voting mechanisms. For one particular probabilistic model describing the preferences of the electorate, the so-called...

We study dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives. The agents are privately informed about their preferences, and have single-crossing utility functions. Monetary transfers are not feasible. We use an...

We analyse committees of voters who take a decision between two options as a two- stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non-verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best option. In a voting stage, votes are cast and one of the options is implemented. We...

We investigate experimentally the effects of corrupt experts on information aggregation in committees. We find that non-experts are significantly less likely to delegate through abstention when there is a probability that experts are corrupt. Such decreased abstention, when the probability of...