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 -...

This paper exploits a natural experiment in Hesse where a reform of the electoral rule from mayor appointment by the local council towards direct mayor elections was introduced during a phase-in period from 1993 to 1998. The end of the term of the last appointed mayor varies across...

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...

We study decision rules for committees that repeatedly take a binary decision. Committee members are privately informed about their payoffs and monetary transfers are not feasible. In static environments, the only strategy-proof mechanisms are voting rules which are criticized for being...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

For a repeated procurement problem, we compare two stylized negotiating cultures which differ in how the buyer uses an entrant to exert pressure on the incumbent resembling U.S. style and Japanese style procurement. In each period, the suppliers are privately informed about their production...

We rationalize a special type of sharing information which can typically be found in markets for occupational disability insurances. There, firms share information about acceptances and rejections of an applicant. We set up a multiple-step signalling model with uninformed agents and endogenize...

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...

Based on the acquiring-a-company game of Samuelson and Bazerman (1985), we theoretically and experimentally analyze the acquisition of a firm. Thereby we compare cases of symmetrically and asymmetrically informed buyers and sellers. This setting allows us to predict and test the effects of...

We study a sequential screening problem where the agent produces an object consisting of multiple items and has a multidimensional type that he learns over time. Depending on the strength of complementarity/substitutability of the items, the optimal allocation features a different pattern of...