We demonstrate that cognitive constraints produce injustice in its most paradigmatic form: incorrect verdicts in judicial trials. Responding to a request for help, we conducted a field study in Mexican labor courts in which time pressure on the judges leads to their making mistakes, many of...

Padding is the practice of adding nonvoters (e.g., noncitizens or disenfranchised prisoners) to an electoral district in order to ensure that the district meets the size quota prescribed by the one man, one vote doctrine without affecting the voting outcome in the district. We show how padding...

In a social choice model with an infinite number of agents, there may occur "equal size" coalitions that a preference aggregation rule should treat in the same manner. We introduce an axiom of equal treatment with respect to a measure of coalition size and explore its interaction with common...

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the hands of the government. Mexico's government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its...

It is shown that in a generic two-jurisdiction model of the type introduced by Caplin and Nalebuff (1997), the number of sorting equilibria (with jurisdictions providing distinct policies) is finite and even.

We develop a model of endogenous party platform formation in a multidimensional policy space. Party platforms depend on the composition of the parties? primary electorate. The overall social outcome is taken to be a weighted average of party platforms and individuals vote strategically....