Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to non-optimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

In this paper the concepts of manipulation as strategic voting (misrepresentation of true preferences) and strategic nomination (by adding, or removing alternatives) are investigated. The connection between Arrow’s and Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorems is discussed from the viewpoint of dilemma...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers' posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper sheds...

In dynamic resource allocation models, the non-existence of voting equilibria is a generic phenomenon due to the multi-dimensionality of the choice space even with agents heterogeneous only in their discount factors. Nevertheless, at each point of time there may exist a "median voter" whose...

We consider a framework where the optimal decision rule determining the collective choice depends in a simple way on the decision makers’ posterior probabilities of a particular state of nature. Nevertheless, voting is generally an inefficient way to make collective choices and this paper...

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. A natural question is what voting system such a committee should use. Concepts based on voting power provide guidelines for this choice. The two most...

In a voting model where the set of feasible alternatives is a subset of a product set $A = A_1\times\cdots\ldots{}A_m$ of $m$ finite categories, we characterize the set of all strategy-proof social choice functions for three different types of preference domains over $A$, namely for the domains...

Utilitarian voting (UV) is defined in this paper as any voting rule that allows the voter to rank all of the alternatives by means of the scores permitted under a given voting scale. Specific UV rules that have been proposed are approval voting, allowing the scores 0, 1; range voting, allowing...

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow's theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow's theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of...