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...

Cerreia-Vioglio, Ghirardato, Maccheroni, Marinacci and Siniscalchi (Economic Theory, 48:341-375, 2011) have recently axiomatised preferences in the presence of ambiguity as Monotonic Bernoullian Archimedean (MBA) preferences. We investigate the problem of Arrovian aggregation of MBA preferences...

We show theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision making and deliberation. We present a model in which committee members have career concerns and unanimity is needed to change the status quo. We study three scenarios -...

Optimal voting rules have to be adjusted to the underlying distribution of preferences. However, in practice there usually is no social planner who can perform this task. This paper shows that the introduction of a stage at which agents may themselves choose voting rules according to which they...

In several empirical contributions researchers have found a gender gap in preferences for public spending. This paper analyzes the persistence of these gender gaps when income differences between individuals are taken into consideration. Using survey data from the years 1996 and 2006 of German...

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral...

In using their citizen candidate framework, Besley and Coate (2001) find that if citizen candidates with sufficiently extreme preferences are available, lobbying has no in fluence on equilibrium policy. I show that this result does not hold in a model with ideological parties instead of citizen...

We investigate whether peer punishment is an efficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation in an experiment with a long time horizon. Previous evidence suggests that the costs of peer punishment can be outweighed by the benefits of higher cooperation, if (i) there is a sufficiently long time...

We analyse river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be su cient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite 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...