This article uses insights from cognitive psychology to contrast judge-made law with legislative and executive policy-making. I argue that the predominant narrow conception of reason and rationality have led to overly optimistic views of deliberate policymaking at the expense of traditional...

We study the problem of aggregating private information in elections with two or more alternatives. We characterize environments where information can be aggregated asymptotically by a sequence of equilibria of voting games as the electorate grows large and explore the implications for the...

In diverse areas – from retirement savings, to fuel economy, to prescription drugs, to consumer credit, to food and beverage consumption – government makes personal decisions for us or helps us make what it sees as better decisions. In other words, government serves as our agent. Understood...

Since the chance of swaying the outcome of an election by voting is usually very small, it cannot be that voters vote solely for that purpose. So why do we vote? One explanation is that smarter or more educated voters have access to better information about the candidates, and are concerned with...

This paper investigates to what extent individual self-selection into different markets can be explained by individuals' risk preferences, overconfidence and market expectations. In a laboratory experiment subjects choose to enter one of three markets. The markets vary in their degree of...

An economic elite wants to buy a public asset as cheaply as possible, whose ownership is decided by an incumbent politician who can be of high or low competence. The elite can exert influence through two channels: they can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer for the asset, and they can manipulate...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

The first scholars to propose, explicitly, that a theory of agency be created, and to actually begin its creation, were Stephen Ross and Barry Mitnick, independently and roughly concurrently. Ross is responsible for the origin of the economic theory of agency, and Mitnick for the institutional...

In this article I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may manipulate voting coalitions to their advantage by crafting different messages to target different winning coalitions. Furthermore, if...

This paper investigates the choice between delegation and centralization within political institutions in the presence of lobbying. Our legislature is composed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. The floor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented whereas...