Since voters are often swayed more by the personal image of politicians than by party manifestos, they may cast votes that are in opposition to their policy preferences. This results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters' own views. An alternative voting...

We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become...

It is proved that, among all restricted preference domains that guarantee consistency (i.e. transitivity) of pairwise majority voting, the single-peaked domain is the only minimally rich and connected domain that contains two completely reversed strict preference orders. It is argued that this...

We analyze bankruptcy problems with an indivisible object, where real owners and outside traders want to allocate an indivisible object among them with monetary compensation. The object might be a company that has gone bankrupt or a house left by a parent who has died, and so on. We show that...

We study strategy-proof probabilistic mechanisms in a binary public decision model when monetary transfers are allowed. We consider not only the pivotal mechanism, the majority voting mechanism, the random serial dictatorship mechanism, and the unanimity mechanism, but also the random chair...

We consider the allocation problem of assigning heterogenous objects to a group of agents and determining how much they should pay. Each agent receives at most one object. Agents have non-quasi-linear preferences over bundles, each consisting of an object and a payment. Especially, we focus on...

We consider a problem of allocating multiple identical objects to a group of agents and collecting payments. Each agent may receive several objects and has quasi-linear preferences with a submodular valuation function. It is known thatWalrasian mechanisms are manipulable. We investigate the...

During the 2016 election to the Student Parliament of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), an experiment on 'The Third Vote' was conducted. The goal was to test an alternative election method based on the idea of internet voting advice applications (VAAs). Under the election method...

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...