Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals' mechanism choices in such...

The impact of a campaign on voters' decisions depends, in part, on when voters make their decisions. Voters who decide at the start of a campaign will be much less influenced by the campaign than those who decide at the end. But what explains when voters make their decisions? We address this...

This paper examines the effect of local political decision-making institutions (i.e., direct democracy vs. representative democracy) on citizens' preferences toward public spending. Exogenous variation in institutions comes from a regression discontinuity design, which exploits a discrete change...

We investigate the influence of correlation neglect on information aggregation when a voter has to weigh external information against her preferences. In an online experiment, the subjects have to vote on either a safe or a risky payment of the same expected value for their society. The voters...

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants...

This paper proposes a model of a legislature, formed by several parties, which has to vote for or against a certain bill in the presence of a lobbyist interested in a certain vote outcome. We show that the ease with which the lobbyist can manipulate a legislature decision increases with the...

Does poor air quality affect decision-making? We study this question based on elections, in which millions of people decide on the same issue on the same day in different locations. We use county-level data from 64 federal and state elections in Germany over a nineteen-year period and exploit...

More than half of the 163 Statements of Financial Accounting Standards issued by the Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) between 1973 and 2007 were passed with dissenting votes. In this study, we investigate the factors associated with FASB board members' decision to dissent. We find that...